XBox 360

Naval Assault: The Killing Tide

Genre: Strategy
Publisher: 505 Games Developer: 505 Games

Release Date(s): US: 2010-06-15

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Naval Assault: The Killing Tide Review

by Anthony Gallegos - IGN.com | 02 July 2010 12:00

Set course for the bargain bins.

If I've learned one thing from Naval Assault: The Killing Tide, it's that being the Captain of a submarine can quickly go from exciting to downright boring. Apparently, subs only possess three depth settings, and combat boils down to the occasional exciting torpedo shot, followed by several moments of evading and/or sitting with your engines off as depth charges explode around you. That is, of course, unless your enemy pilots his ship into the terrain and kills himself in a reckless effort to take you down.

Yet, woefully stupid enemy A.I. is only one of Naval Assault's many problems. Its controls are just too simplistic to make the largely uninspired missions feel worth slogging through. The levels are plenty difficult, sure -- but controlling the sub doesn't amount to much at all. You can switch between seven gears and three depth settings for your sub, but beyond this, the only other consequential action you can take are to shut the engine off completely (thus going silent and avoiding detection), or shoot at enemy ships with torpedoes and deck guns. The difficultly often derives from overwhelming situations, where you must time shots well and avoid being shot at by hordes of ships around you, or kill way too many ships in a short amount of time.

Not that I'm trying to say that simplicity is always a bad thing; it's just that in Naval Assault's case, it all feels so basic that the repetitious mission structure becomes duller by the minute. Each mission I played essentially broke down to one or more of the following: killing several ships, disabling ships, navigating through minefields while avoiding detection, or simply sitting with my engines off while depth charges went off around me. It's the type of drama that makes for riveting movies... but in a game where you're performing the same repetitive tasks for several hours, it becomes tedious.

Repetitive mission design aside, a certain destructive part of me was pleased each time I successfully hit a moving target with a well-placed torpedo. The freedom to strike specific sections of the ship (such as the propulsion system, combined with the game's post-shot guidance system (wherein you can slightly direct a torpedo's course for a short time after it leaves the sub), made for combat that required a skilled operator. Waiting to see if your torpedo flies true to your target is, without a doubt, the most intense the game gets -- and it's really the only gratifying part of an otherwise agonizingly slow affair.

And yes, age-old wisdom might say that slow and steady wins the race, but it sure as hell loses my interest in a hurry. As I played Naval Assault, a steady stream of co-workers walked by to see me glancing at a webpage, controller in my lap, paying no attention to the screen. They'd look inquisitively at the game, wondering why I didn't just pause it, and I'd explain that I was indeed playing, just waiting for my ship to reach it's destination, or perhaps sitting somewhere with the engines cut in order to wait for the right moment to strike. Maybe that sounds engaging to you -- and sure, I get that the developers tried to emulate real-life sub missions (where real lives are on the line) -- but this sort of pacing just doesn't translate to videogame all that well.

The pacing issue probably could have been partially resolved by employing the variety of submarines that the game offers, but every sub (except one) is locked from the start. If you want to command a sub with two torpedo tubes, or a speedy sub that can tackle hit-and-run levels with ease, you really have to work for it. I'm not one to cry foul about unlockables, but this is one case where the game seems to be impeding my enjoyment for the sake of marking off a "has unlockables" checkbox on some design doc. At minimum, a few more starting choices would have been nice.

You'd think the online multiplayer mode might have been where I found the constant action and tension-filled moments I longed for -- especially since fighting the dimwitted enemy A.I. becomes predictable -- but that implies other people to play with. Not once, during the several attempts I made to play the game, did I find even one other player looking for an opponent. In the vast ocean of Xbox 360 owners, I'm apparently the only Captain looking to bring my ship to bear against another.

Closing Comments
If Naval Assault had been a downloadable Xbox Live Arcade title, it would have been easy to forgive a lot of its shortcomings. Unfortunately, it’s not; it looks like a last-gen game, with some of the worst sound design and music I’ve seen in a retail release, no mid-mission checkpoints, and most importantly, not much to hold one's interest for more than a few fleeting moments. You might be tempted to pick it up for some online combat, but buyer beware -- I’m pretty sure this ship sank before even making it out of the harbor.

Supplied by IGN.com

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