33LIMA

Even if you consider Steam a work of the Devil himself - and while I'm not a fan, I have to admit Steam isn't any such thing - you've got to do yourself a favour and get this, if you have any interest in WW2 naval action. It's addictive, cheap, great to look at and to play, and has the single player and historical elements that World of Ships doesn't. I just played another of the many historical battles, Salmon and Gluckstein (as the RAF called Scharnhorst and Gneisenau) intercepting Glorious, Ardent and Acasta during the Norwegian campaign in 1940 and it was an absolute feast. As in real life, the two RN destroyers bravely defended their charge, the aircraft carrier Glorious, making smoke and putting themselves between the Germans and their prey. The big surprise was that Glorious managed to launch her Swordfish who suffered some losses from our vigorous flak but dive-bombed the living crap out of Scharnhorst, which was then finished off by a second wave with torpedoes. Gneisenau managed to avoid the tin fish and although my shooting was pretty awful even after I realised I needed to allow for the strong crosswind, I finally got the carrier and one of the destroyers, leaving the survivor limping off behind a smokescreen. This is a TERRIFIC game!

The more I play Atlantic Fleet, the more impressed I am. Yes everything is simplified, but it's not over-simplified. I can launch carrier airstrikes without having to turn into the wind, but there is a realistic sequence, whereby you arm your planes with the chosen weapons, 'spot' them on deck, launch, strike and recover. And for the strike, you are assigning individual targets to each plane in the strike, and choosing the weapon release point. It's happily easy to pick up while feeling you are playing not an arcade game but a wargame, where things are simulated without every underlying detail or procedure being physically represented. And it's all great fun. No decent, reasonably realistic WW2 naval PC games for ages, then two come at once (Victory at Sea and now Atlantic Fleet). If you are at all interested in this genre, Atlantic Fleet is simply a must-have, an incredible package for the low asking price, like getting a fast convoy for the price of a tramp steamer, or a heavy cruiser for the cost of a gunboat. If you're not interested in the genre, try it regardless, you'll likely love it anyway! Get your sea-boots on and some enemy tonnage onto your account!

Yes I'm thinking the same, Atlantic Fleet is a great game, a real gem. I'm even getting to the point I hardly notice my pet hate, the stop-go move sequence. Now I've been playing a little while, it just fades into the background. The set of tutotials is rather good too, though I'm not sure all the keys are working as described, possibly just unfamiliarity on my part. Of course I ignored all the tutorial missions at first, but having got stuck with setting up torpedo attacks, I checked them out, and they are most useful, with the ability to practice everything from said torpedo attacks to calling in airstrikes... and boy, do I need the practice... With no bombsight, bombs are dropped from the external view, but you do need to take account of target movement and crosswinds, which I found bombing diagonally across the target coped with best. And while I think all ships in a given class are represented by the same model and texture - eg Gneisenau has Scharnhorst's rear-stepped mainmast - the ship models are just gorgeous, like this Queen Elizabeth class BB and Hipper class CA (the latter illuminated by the starshells both sides can fire, and which improve spotting accuracy in darkness):