Make no mistake about it - when it comes to popularity, there are few games that can boast as passionate an audience as Wargaming.net's World of War series. While the perceived wisdom has it that the only true successes are the uber-budget AAA titles (like the recently released Destiny), or cheap, simple, freemium games like Candy Crush Saga, the World of... series straddles the gap somewhere between a big budget sim and a free to play game, and has reached astronomical heights. With 90m registered accounts on the PC version of World of Tanks, 10m players on World of Warplanes, 3.8m on the Xbox 360 version of World of Tanks, and the recently released iOS shooter, World of Tanks Blitz having notched up a whopping 6m download within four weeks, this is a series not to be sniffed at - and one that's showing no signs of stopping.
Having covered battles on land with Tanks, and in the air with Warplanes, the next World of game looks set to take the battles to sea, in the shape of World of Warships. Following much the same format as the previous games, Warships will be a multiplayer only, mostly team-based sim, where teams of players, each taking control of a vessel of their choosing, fight it out on the stormy waters in a game of strategy, timing, and rocks, paper scissors mechanics. And at the recent German games fest, gamescom, we got to go hands-on with it, behind closed doors.
Full steam ahead!
As is often the way with games like this, the first choice you have to make is the first important, as you have to choose your ship. With two nations to choose from initially - America and Japan - the ships on offer are divided up into four separate classes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. At the bottom of the size ladder, you have the destroyers, which are decent all round ships with fairly small guns (but a fast rate of fire), fairly thin armour (but a high top speed because of the reduced weight), and perhaps most importantly, a decent selection of torpedoes. Moving up from the destroyers in terms of size are the Cruisers, which pack bigger guns and more armour at the expense of manoeuvrability, and above them lie the Battleships - the kings of the water - with gigantic guns, a huge range of fire, and armour that smaller weapons will just ping off. Finally, as a kind of outlier in the game's rankings, you have the aircraft carriers - huge, hulking ships that carry entire squadrons of planes on board, but have little in the way of defensive armament, making playing as them a rather different sort of challenge...
With a tricky choice ahead of us, and the game's producer hinting we should probably err on the side of caution and go for the size and relative safety of a battleship, we did what we always do in situations like this, and did the exact opposite. Choosing a destroyer, the smallest of the small - but also the fastest of the lot - we fancied a challenge - and as our first time playing the game, in the hardest class of ship to learn, we were certainly in for one.
The rules of the mode we played are pretty simple. Divided up into two teams, it's up to you to either sink everyone on the other team, or get one of your ships to the enemy's base. If you can stay at the base for a certain amount of time without anyone getting close enough to stop you, you'll capture it, and the game will be yours - in much the same way as if you'd just sunk all the enemy's ships. With the countdown clock ticking, and a fleet of fellow players expecting us to be at least somewhat competent at sailing, we set our ship to full steam ahead. Time to see what this thing can do.
One of the problems with demoing a multiplayer only game is that it's hard for people to learn the ropes. If it's your first time playing, and you only get a single life (so if you're sunk, it's back to the menu with the hat of shame for you), you tend to find you're overly cautious. At least, that's the excuse we're using for our first encounter. Having spent a few seconds looking around frantically, we spotted a battleship lurking behind a nearby island. You know, as battleships do. Knowing that we were dead meat if he got any closer, we panicked, and while moving at full speed, fired off a salvo as a warning shot, only to end up pounding a crater into the island's beach, and giving a few monkeys a nasty surprise.
One of the first things you learn about World of Warships is that aiming is trickier than you'd expect. When aiming at a target, not only have you got to keep in mind that your target's moving, and not only have you got to try and judge the range by making very minor adjustments with the mouse, but you've also got to take into account the time the shell takes to get there. As your shells are fired up into the air, rather than directly at your enemy, they take a while to come down - and so while your cursor may be in the right place when you let rip, your foe may have sauntered out of the way by the time they come splashing down. And while it might be nice to be able to set the range using the mouse wheel, or something similar, you're instead left using the mouse, pushing the cursor up the screen to aim further into the distance, or pulling it down to fire shots a bit closer. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's far from impossible.
Still, having dealt a warning blow to the battleship and left him quivering at the knees, we decided to steer away, and look for a target more our size. It was at this point our destroyer spontaneously combusted. Suddenly coming under a huge amount of fire, one of the shells hit, and immediately set fire to the aft of our ship. Seemingly, those warning shots came closer than we thought. Luckily, we weren't condemned to Davy Jones' locker just yet, as pressing R (presumably for repair) will tell your crew to drop what they're doing, and put the fire out rather than just wait for it to start lapping at their ankles, while pressing T drops a smoke screen around your ship. Which, even if it wasn't all that useful for us to hide behind, at least disguised the fact that we were damaged, which would have made us even more of a sitting duck.
Whoops.
Of course, the deck guns on a destroyer aren't the most powerful weapon at your disposal. That goes to the torpedoes, which are harder to aim, but which can do much more damage to a ship. Hit a battleship below the waterline, and if you don't sink it directly, you can at least scupper it, knocking out its engines, making it list, and turning it into an easy target for the rest of your team.
Torpedoes do have one major problem, though - they're incredibly hard to aim. With ships being fairly fast moving things, torpedoes being incredibly slow, and a large distance (plus random islands) in between you and your prey, aiming them can be a nightmare, especially on a choppy sea. It's even worse if your foe sees the torpedoes coming, as they run so close to surface, they leave a telltale wake behind, which gives a ship just enough time to take evasive action and avoid taking too much damage. Luckily, where there's a will, there's a way.
You can fire your torpedoes in one of two modes on World of Warships. First off, you can fire them in a spread, which effectively lets you take the shotgun approach - by firing them across a fairly wide arc, you're making it a lot harder for your opponent to dodge (unless they fancy trying to slot themselves between two torpedoes), but you're less likely to cause a critical hit. If you think you're close enough, you can switch to a much narrower arc, that'll pretty much fire your torpedoes in a straight line - but of course, it's then easier for your opponent to dodge.
By far the trickiest part of torpedoes though is actually trying to get them to go in the right way, as you have to do a veritable mental maths Olympics in your head to try and work out how fast the ship's going, how fast your torpedo travels, and so how far in front of the ship you'll have to aim. Luckily, this ship had the option of working that out for us - pressing X would let the game do the hard work, and calculate what it thinks is the optimum trajectory. Of course, it wouldn't always be right - but it was worth a try. A quick click of the mouse a few seconds later, and our torpedoes were away. Fly (or swim?) true, my pretties.
Islands are incredibly useful for hiding behind - and for launching sneak attacks
Coming back out of the zoomed in torpedo view, we were soon faced with another problem. Not a battleship - and not even an enemy plane circling overhead, as our gunners were doing a pretty good job of dealing with those. No, this was something much more deadly - and something that would scuttle us for good. LAND! With all the aiming excitement, we'd left our ship heading at full steam towards a tropical island paradise, and were about to run aground on its beach. Cutting the engines, and steering as hard as we could, we took evasive action and narrowly, only just managed to avoid coming a cropper. Let that be a lesson to us all. The only thing more dangerous than a 460mm cannon shell in World of Warships - our driving.
You see, there's a lot to keep an eye on in World of Warships. You have to watch the water around you for signs of torpedoes; tell your crew to put out a fire if you catch alight; try and figure out the range and angle to fire upon the enemy; and, perhaps most importantly of all, you have to remember to watch where you're going.
There's even more to keep an eye on if you choose to go in an aircraft carrier. Here, rather than taking the fight to the enemy directly, your job is more strategic. All you really have to do is hide somewhere on the other side of the map, and then send your planes to do your dirty work. Sadly, rather than having direct control over the planes yourself, your job is as more of a commander than a pilot, as you instead only have to tell your planes where to go, who to attack, and what to bomb.
To ensure a well balanced team, you can only have up to two aircraft carriers on each team - otherwise things get a bit weird - but the team have also worked hard to ensure there are no truly weak ships, and each has their own advantages. A destroyer may get blown out of the water if a battleship even so much as looks at it in the wrong way, but its torpedoes and speed make it deadly if the battleship's distracted. In a team game, all you really need is for your battleship to open fire on theirs, and you've got the opening you need.
And, perhaps, that's what's given the World of... games their strength. With World of Warships looking to deliver the same, heavily team based action, only on a different type of terrain, it's less about what ship you choose, and less about how many ships you sink, because what matters is how well you work as a team. As it turns out, we worked pretty well. Having narrowly avoided the island, a warning siren began, as our carrier dropped anchor in the enemy base. 3... 2... 1... we win. Final score: 1 ship sunk, 2 ships damaged, and nothing more to show for it than a slight fire on our deck, a near miss with an island, and a few concussed monkeys. Not bad for a first try.
