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World War 2 naval action with Evil Twin's 2014 release For a long time, many of us have been tied up at our home ports, fretting at our virtual quaysides with varying degrees of impatience; waiting for the launch of a decent simulation of naval surface action in World War 2. Sure, we still have the Silent Hunter series for submarine operations and other titles for surface action in earlier and later eras. And we have games like Navy Field and World of Warships, plus older stuff like Battlestations Midway/Pacific. But what we don't have is a proper surface combat simulation, a truly worthy successor to classics like SSI's Fighting Steel and Destroyer Command - notwithstanding some Silent Hunter mods which provide a limited measure of surface ship action. Destroyer Command did what it did (the clue here, being in the title) reasonably well, despite the gaping ommission of ship-laid smokescreens (other than a purely visual mod, whose screens offered no actual cover). This meant you couldn't use the classic destroyer tactic of launching torpedoes while making smoke, then putting about and disappearing into your ready-made smokescreen. Still, as a sim of operating US destroyers, it wasn't bad and the graphics were better than the earlier SSI sim, Fighting Steel. Despite very basic graphics, no land, subs or planes, Fighting Steel, especially with the FSP mod, was - and IMHO still is - the classic WW2 ship sim. We get a good range of adequately-modelled warships (and transports) from the German, British, US and Japanese navies and the ability to re-fight most of the classic WW2 surface ship actions, many added by the mod community. The FS command interface was extremely well designed, giving alternative 2d (map) and 3d views and the ability to command individual ships or divisions - which you do by issuing orders for speed, course, target and weapon selection via a neat set of icons. Whether you found this intuitive or not, the thing that struck me was that it looked like the designers' aim was to put the player the role of the ship's captain (or commander of a division of ships), letting AI-run systems take care of the rest. They didn't fall into the trap of giving you some kind of gamey, simplified, crosshaired gunsight to aim your weapons, or worse a floating reticle in the 3-d world. I didn't miss FS's lack of land, even for the Gaudalcanal actions; likewise, the lack of planes or subs. Night battles became much more interesting when the FSP mod added tracers and AI was quite good, with ships making good use of smoke screens. Gun and torpedo action was what FS did and it did both very well indeed. Which I relished, having been brought up in the post-WW2 era and soaked up TV documentaries like The Valiant Years and films like Sink the Bismarck! and Battle of the River Plate. I made many a 1/600 Airfix warship kit, back in the days before multi-lingual instruction sheets no longer told you that part 21 was actually the starboard main armament fire director. And I really loved the 1/1200 Eagle kits, released in themed sets based on famous Royal Navy actions. Each kit had a little potted history of the relevant battle in its box. Marvellous stuff. Nothing I've tried since Fighting Steel has come close to providing a convincing PC simulation of classic WW2 surface actions, being either too 'gamey' or too limited in scope - usually both. And unfortunately, FS's graphics engine won't run on modern PCs. Still, it was a classic, worth playing if you have an old enough system somewhere to hand (Win 98 to XP inclusive, IIRC). And so to the to the present day...last week, in fact. While I'm on holiday, I usually visit local video game shops or departments, on the lookout for bargains - typically, games I might not try, at full price. Wargame: European Escalation was a recent example, and a good one, too, bought on Spain's Costa del Sol earlier this year and impressing me so much that I later bought a follow-on title, Wargame: Airland Battle. True to form, last week in a Game store on the Costa Blanca, I browsed the few shelves these days left over to PC games. With my head canted over to scan the end titles on the racked DVD cases of the non-top 10 games, I spotted one called Victory at Sea. Despite keeping a weather eye open for the Messiah of WW2 surface combat sims, I was intrigued that I'd never heard of that one. Worth a look, I thought, if only to confirm it was either an arcade 'ship shooter' or a tedious shipyard stategy game. At nearly twenty Euros, Victory at Sea wasn't coming at a knock-down price, and therefore wasn't something I was inclined to pick up, on the off chance that I might like it. I was offline and unlikely to return to the store from the resort, so I'd have to decide there and then, without checking out online reviews. Decisions, decisions! Disregarding the flashy cover artwork of what looked like a KGV battleship and a Gato-class sub being bombed by Japanese Army fighters, I had a look at the back, studying the little screenshots and applying my very limited Spanish to the 'blurb'. This actually looked promising - WW2 naval combat in the Atlantic, the Med or the Pacific, with campaigns in the British, German, Japanese and US navies; quick battles which added French, Dutch and Italians; subs and aircraft as well as surface action; over a hundred types (classes?) of ship; and real-time 3-d world action, not just some overly map-based navy-building strategy game. Victory at Sea appeared to be firmly single player and firmly historical, not some kind of Multi-Player, third person 'battleship shooter'. The cover boasted a TIGA award by for 'Best action adventure from small studio', which also sounded promising. OK, decision made! I'd give this a go. Maybe this would finally be the one, something that at long last came close to filling the seaboots vacated by Fighting Steel. Having picked up the DVD from the shop's desk, I noticed I also got a mini-manual and browsing this soon after exiting the premises, my heart sank. Apart from brief installation instructions (via Steam) and a tabular listing of about 30 hotkey commands, the mini-manual consisted of several pages depicting the game's 'classes of ship'. First problem, the ship images, evidently featuring game models, were rather basic - more detailed that Fighting Steel's ships, but rather crude, with some inaccuracies and simplifications. And a quick count showed under thirty distinct ship classes, leaving major gaps - for example, Germany had no battlecruisers or heavy cruisers. Were they counting every named ship in each class, to reach the claim of '100 tipos de barcos' in the blurb? But I needn't have worried - many more classes of ships are included. Any WW2 naval afficionado will understand how important this is - a WW2 surface combat sim which doesn't provide famous and important ships like (sticking with the Kriegsmarine example) the Deutschland class 'pocket battleships', the battlecruisers Scharnhorst or Gneisenau or a Hipper class heavy cruiser, just isn't cutting the mustard. There were few enough real WW2 surface actions and a Battle of the North Cape for example really must have Scharnhorst, as well as a KGV (for Duke of York) and sundry British cruisers. Even if you're just going to fight your own semi-historical campaign, you need to have a representative selection of the ships your chosen navy had, in that theatre and during that period. But they're all there and more besides, in Victory at Sea; they're just not all listed in the mini-manual. Phew! So, back home and unpacked, it was time to blow the cobwebs off the PC, fire her up and then load up my latest sim. This review is the result. So is Victory at Sea a shell-swept triumph on, above and below the seas, or a soggy defeat, best consigned to Davy Jones's locker? Time to find out what this simmer thought of her, anyway! ...to be continued!