As amazing as a cardboard box.
Welcome to Navy Field; a massively multiplayer online tactics simulation game based on World War II naval warfare by SD EnterNet.
This it the first sentance you read when you find official advertisements about Navyfield. I do not know about the rest of you but when I read the words " Tactical simulation" I get excited and think there is going to be a heavy level of strategy and a good amount of realism. These are the two things this game has the least of.
The strategy element in this game is extremely limited because all battles have to be over in 15 minutes because there is literally a 15 minute timer on all fights. Which in a 30 vs 30 fight, 15 minutes means that everything has to happen so fast that there is no real room for strategy.
The even sadder reality is that almost all fights are over before the 15 minute timer hits, and many are over before the half way point on said timer. THis means that team tactics absolutely do not exist. There is no way that 30 people can pull off a well organized strategy in 7 minutes. This is a zerg fest. What makes this even worst is that the maps are rather small. When a battleship can fire its shells and reach 70% of the map from a single spot, that is way to small. There is no safe place.
And for the carriers who's job is to stand back as far as you an and send out wave after wave of planes, prepair to be flamed by grumpy low levels who are upset they cannot sit next to you and shoot you over and over.
I started playing before open beta, back in 2004 and 2005. in 7 years what is new? Harbor battles, 2 new nations, and a bunch of nearly useless crap on the micro purchase store. ANd let us not forget those submarines.
7 years to release 1 useful feature. Many would argue the micro purchase stuff is great, I disagree. Sure you can get a powerful ship a bit early but it will be quickly out paced anyway. You canget a level 45ish ship at level 33, a level 65ish ship at 52. But after you spend 10 buck on a ship and in a week level past it what good is it? Just a novely item to jump back in for giggles when you get tired of the ENDLESS GRIND.
Some would even argue that the two new nations would be an awesome addition. Fact is the only thing they offer is a different name next to your ship. Most of the ships are so close to being simular that they do not deserve a name. The only ship I can think of in the game that other nations do not have a clone of, is the Japanese Kitakami which is just a flat ship with a crap ton of torpedos and no guns. Other than that most of the ships kind of blurr together. I realize there are going to be a bunch of people that disagree with that because of their ability to use a specific ship better for AA or what ever that other nations lack, but that comes down to skill more than game mechanics.
To even more spit int he face of the new nations, the whole game is a great big mosh pit when it comes to fights. Japanese are no more allied with Germany than they are enemies with the United States. Teams are randomly mixed. All six nations are spread across the two teams at random, screw alliances. This further enhances the blandness of individual nation technologies because there is no way for a person to make a strategy to work with his or her nation type.
And on the subject of strategy you have harbor battles, which have one very unique feature. Perhaps the only feature in this game that I think is truly smart. If you happen to own 10 ships, you get to use each of those ships in the harbor battle. When in a harbor battle state you can restock your ammo and repair your damaged ship. But you cannot refit your ship and you cannot repair a sunken ship. This means, when your ship is gone, it is gone until after the harbor battle. THis is by far the absolute most genius feature this game has.
By the way, the only real use for having a harbor is that your members of your fleet can rent battleships 40ish levels sooner than they would be able to buy them. Which is not entirely useful because often times that means both they, and their crew lack the ability to use them efficiently.
Of course you have to be in a fleet/guild to take part in a harbor battle. Which is another virtually useless feature. Because even if you are in a fleet with other players when you go into a battle you are randomly assigned to a team. The idea of going into battle with fleet mates to try and organize strategy? Start throwing knives at a glass ceiling you will have more luck that way.
Solo playability? Yeah right. While most MMOs have things that can be done alone, and things that heavily require a team, this game craps on that. There are some missions a player can do alone sure. But again, start throwing knives at that glass ceiling again because these missions are about as useful. The early missions teach you the extreme basic mechanics of turning your boat and guns. After that the difficulty level spikes to such a level that you still can not do them alone unless you have invested HEAVILY in that cash mall.
And submarines. Those oh so amazingly pathetic submarines. I am no expert on WWII but these submarines that can only stay submerged for 2 minutes then have to come up and sail around for 2-3 minutes to gather air to go back below... is pathetic. Now even if we go with the idea of scaling time down to that 15 minute window, it is still pathetic. Most naval battles in WWII lasted only a few hours. Only a handful of the worst battles passed 6 hours The whole crew moral thing and the inability to see in the dark. Now let us even do to the extreme and use a 16 hour battle an example, that is pretty much from sun up to sun set. Even the cheap submarines low tech at the beginnng of the war could stay under for 8 hours. So that should mean a submarine in Navyfield should stay under for at least 7 minutes. Keep wishing.
While most people complain about a game having a painful grind, this game takes it to a new level. While there are a wopping 4 battle modes.
Great Battle/Great BattleII which are basically your wide open brawl. The only "interesting" factor is that if one team's flag ship is sunk (which is randomly selected via a mathematical formula even the staff seems to not know.) then that team has 5 minutes to sink the other team's flag ship in retaliation or they lose. WHich does not really matter givent he fast paced brawl of battles that rarely last 10 inutes anyway.
The next battle mode is Night Battle which is purely battleships and carriers, again with the the scrambled teams. The only unique feature here is the severely reduced visual ranges which can only be counters by "star shot" which is basically a flare that scouts drop like a bomb.
Blitzkrieg, the pinical of fast paced combat. This is a battle specific for low levels 1-60 is welcome here. 61-120 are not welcome. The only unique thing about this is that SOME nations can sneak in a battleship or carrier. Japan especially since their early stages of battleships are a bit weaker than other nations they get them a couple levels sooner.
And finally there is operation convoy. Perhaps the most interesting battle mode but even it is highly limited on what an be done strategy wise. This one lets anything other than Battleships and carriers join. And it is literally a snatch and run. Near the middle of the battlefield a box will spawn. Both teams are in a race to run in, touch the box, then run PAST their enemy to a goal that is behind the enemy spawn spot. challenging and fun. But ultimately how long can a teenager or adult play what equates to a children's game of capture the flag before it gets old?
I do admit I loved this game early on. When they started to fire most of their creative staff, and all their patches were nerfs I lost love. I know many MMOs suffer from nerfs but seriously these people took it to the extreme. They would nerf one nation's battleship gun because it's range was to much. Then a week later they would nerf another nation's gun because the one they nerfed last week was to short now. So they would keep rebalancing guns and engines and such every week tweaking little numbers and putting them back and such. And they did this every week until the point where a 600mb game folder got up to 1.8gb with all these patches that undid previous patches and such while nothing truely got added to the game.
Another huge issue with this game is clumsy controls. There is an auto FCS (fire control system) that will allow you to just point and click to aim your weapons to that point, but even that is clumsy. It is very possible and frequent for you to click on a spot for your weapons to target and they start spinning in a different direction because their "pathfinding" is lost. Not unlike other games that use point and click as a method of moving, yet you can click 2 inches infront of yourself and find your toon running 5 miles to the left to run laps around the block and come back to the original destination 2 hours later. Problem with this auto FCS is that it lowers your accuracy which means your shells will spread out more during flight often times looking more like a shotgun blast rather than a well planned "block shot" as it has been coined when all your shots land in a tight configuration.
Now if you do not wish to deal with the auto FCS or you consider yourself "better than the rest" and which to use the manual FCS. This means your shots will have a tighter configuration, but at what cost? I will tell you. The controls here are even more clumsy.
For example, if you start out and want to turn your guns all the way to the right (Starboard) side of your ship, the button to use is "D" where as port would be "A" which is simple enough. But now let us assume you have all your guns to the Starboard side of your ship, and your ship is aimed north. The guy you want to attack is slightly to the north of being straight east of you and is traveling north at the same speed you are. What button do you push to bring your guns up to aim at him? Q of course. Which rotates all your guns to the left relitive to the direction your ship is facing. Which in itself is annoying but simple enough. Until you start getting into some awkward ships that have such narrow turn arks that you have your back guns unwilling to lead their shots when your traveling side by side with a target.
All these controls are great in the theory that you can stand still and fire at a slow moving target or always be moving inthe same direction as your target. It even gets more confusing when you change directions and your heading south because now left is right, and right is left. Also while your trying to turn your gun's aim is jerking while your ship does its jerky turn. which can cause your guns to look their relitively allignment because sometimes your ship will turn but your guns will not turn with it they will attempt to stay aimed in the direction they will before your turn. Meaning when when one set of guns reaches its maximum turn angle relitive to the ship they will then drag with the ship turning while your other set of guns continue to hover seemingly. Now in order to bring all guns to bear in the same direction again you will have to slam them all to port or starboard until they are crosseyed then readjust them so they are all pointing in the same direction.
Do I have you irritated with the clumsiness of the controls? Good let us move on to the next problem. The narrow scope of the view. when you get into battleships your range is naturally much larger than those of a destroyer. A destroyer can easily have his ship, and his absolute maximum range on the same screen to see at the same time. Battleships have no such hope. As a battleship driver your ship will often be several screen lengths away from the place you are looking. So you are unable to see those idiots that like to sail over top of you (yet another massive problem) so when you finally have a bearing on that carrier that has been shooting down your scouts, and you fire.. you sink one of your own team mates because he thought it would be cool to try and exist in the exact time and space as yourself and he took the hit of every one of your shells literally as they were still in the barrel of your guns. This not only gets half your team yelling at you for TKing but it also blows what may have been your only chance to seriously hurt that carrier whom just shot down ANOTHER of your scout planes thanks to your team mate.
The above problem is slightly countered by the ability to zoom out part way, but this zoom function often does not work and results in your screen freezing until you disable zoom all together.
The massive range of battleships (and carriers) is enhanced by another problem. While you are far away from your ship telecommunicating all your commands, who is driving your ship? Well you are of course. All driving is done by mouse click. So when you hear the warning that torpedos have been spotted you have to abandon your efforts to aim and go back to the area your ship is. You have to determine if the torpedos are near you, if they are heading to you, or if you can even find the darn things. That warning occurs any time a torpedo enters yoru visual range. Even if it only appears for a split second because your sailing north and it JUST reached the south side of your line of site then you sailed out of view in half a second. So while your screwing around trying to dodge torpedos that may or may not exist (or may even below to an ally and were launched AWAY from you thus could never have been a threat) who knows how many shots you may have missed on ripe targets.
This same problem exists for planes. Any time an enemy plane appears in your visual range you recieve a verbal warning. Then you have to either ignore what may be a group of dive bombers coming to remove your existance in a matter of seconds, or scramble back across the map to try and find what maybe a scout plane that again just skirted your LOS long enough to be noticed by the computer yet is already gone and you cannot find. Thus again... missing a couple good shots.
Then comes the question. What about AA? Well I have to tell you AA is hard on here just like one would expect for the era. There are plenty of players who are good at it, I confess I am not one of them. But my big beef is if I am in a high end battleship trying to aim my main guns down range, why is it that all my AA guns and Dual Purpose guns are just sitting there. I fully expect that if I am controlling the main guns then the other lesser guns should work on their own. If i am trying to shoot another battleship four screens away and some little destroyer comes up near me, my smaller side guns shoudl open fire on him. But sadly, no. I have to stop shootting at that battleship and switch to my secondary guns and start on that destroyer myself. I cannot ignore him because I know came well he is going to be all to happy to load me full or torpedos since his main guns cannot hurt me...wait yes they can.
Unlike in real life, a little destroyer shooting 3 inch spitballs CAN bust through a couple FEET of steel armor. Granted the damage is not serious with each shot. But I will tell you I have sunk a Super Yamato with an Tsukekei which is a destroyer that has no torpedos. The guy was so busy down range that I took him from full down and sunk him without any help from my team. He was to busy looking elsewhere that he did not see the flea. A prime example of why the secondary guns need to work on their own.
And the last fatal flaw in this game since virtually every feature in this game is flawed. What do to with all those ships? Yes you can literally have a dozen shipsin this game, per nation. And there are six nations so you can have well over 60 ships in this game. So what can you do with them all? Aside from harbor battles you can assign one low level ship to be your escort, CA or below. What does an escort do? Well if you join a battle that has escorts enabled it is a little ship that makes every effort to sail circles around you and shoot at your enemies. You can either equip it for fighting ships, or planes. You cannot do both because it is not smart enough to use its secondary weapons or switch to a secondary ammo type.
The reality of it is, that if you really want to try this game just drop the 10 bucks for a a single month of premium and play the Japanese line. In your one month you can play every class of ship and see 90% of the game and move on with your life without much regret.
In 7 years they add 4 petty and insiginificant things. This is why I give this game such a low score.
Better yet, do not waste your 10 bucks on trying this game for a month. Spend your 10 bucks on getting Pacific Storm: Allies You will get several THOUSAND time more game play out of it for the same price and when you are done with it you can sell it to get some of your money back.
Which I could give this game a 0.1 or something. Even 1 seems to high.
So my summary is that the one best feature in this game is that when your ship is sunk in a harbor battle, your ship stays sunk until it is over. The one worst feature in this game, is everything except the harbor battles.