Sea Power : Naval Combat in the Missile Age

I've been in the navy for 15 years, working in the CIC as an EW controller and commander. This game is the most realistic sim I've ever seen, although I'd love to see more EW implementations. There are a few unrealistic elements, like shared contacts between aircraft and subs, but these are just minor issues. Playing scenarios feels a lot like exercises I did in the navy. Only think I would love to see is lost contacts to stay on the map as dead dead reckoned contacts and I'd love to have options for contact info view on the map. Using waypoints for missiles and add time to impact calculations would also be nice, to be able to attack a contact from multiple angles to saturate enemy defenses and hide the point of missile release as much as possible.

But overall this game really is a complete package and makes me go back in time to when I was in the navy. The devs really delivered. 9/10 if you ask me.

I joined Sea Power as a content creator/early access tester. I love this game.
It's the naval I've always looked for since Dangerous Waters and Sub Command from way back in the day (no, I didn't play Harpoon - before my time).
Sea Power has lots of different mechanics working together:
- How do you set up your battlegroup? What ship can do what task?
- Which sensors do I use to detect contacts around? Are they hostile?
- How am I going to plan my attack?
- How will I survive the backlash?
- Do I need to worry about submarines? If so, where?
The game has tons of surface ships, submarines and planes and with the modding-friendly format I only expect more and more units to be added.
During testing and creating videos I was in touch with the developers a lot. They were very responsive and most bugs that I found were very quickly solved. That gives me a lot of hope for early access.
In case you have reservations about this being early access: you don't have to play it right now. Let it develop more if you feel like that's the better choice for you. I, for one, have played a far rougher version than what's available at launch and really enjoyed it.
Being able to make scenarios and easily share those with the community is also going to be a big help to the longevity of this game. Making scenarios is pretty easy and fun to do. Don't want to? Pull some new scenarios from the workshop if you've completed all the regular missions.
Overall I highly recommend Sea Power. Hope you will enjoy it.

YES - but I must warn you. The game in its current state is extremely frustrating to play due to bugs with formations, weapons, and aircraft. There are rewarding moments, but this game will need several weeks or months worth of patches before it's ready. I would not pay the current asking price, and would instead wait at least until Christmas time.

The most comprehensive naval simulation with 3D graphics we have had in decades, and it is just getting started.
The game is early in development, but the roadmap looks promising. Bugs are being squashed at a very good pace and there is already a bunch of content both in the base game and on the workshop.
I recommend the game at the current price point, and I do think it is fair considering this is a small team in a very specific niche. No AAA studio is ever going to touch this genre again. If us consumers want more detailed military simulations, we need to support the devs that decide jump in and take the risks to create these games.
I know the above statement may sound rich coming from a guy who got the game for free, however I have purchased (thus far) one copy for a buddy and grabbed the soundtrack.

This is truly a dream come true... only 51 minutes in, however I've been able to visit my 2 at-sea commands whilst in the US Navy in the early to mid 90s.... The USS Harry E. Yarnell (CG-17} and the USS Yorktown (CG-48). Both ships are lovingly modeled and a joy to watch.
Thank you Triassic and Microprose. You've made an old salt's day :)

I gave it a "recommended" but wouldn't advise you buy it until at least the end of next year, depending on how much progress is made.
It feels like it will be a very good game, the bones are there. It just needs another year of development and polishing before it is prime-time ready. It is a bit rough as things stand. Especially in terms of performance.
Quick summary of general issues which will hopefully and eventually be solved:
- Controls aren't intuitive and they are buggy; giving a fire order can cause ships to leave formation or change course to "unmask" their weapons when you just want them to continue following the course you set. Giving a fire order overrides all other orders and locks you out of control until you cancel it. Giving a different order does not cancel the previous order, selecting "weapons free" for air targets only still makes the ship engage everything on the surface and locks you out of control (that last one is supposedly fixed in the latest patch, but it still behaves how I described it). Sometimes ships forget to return back to formation after giving them a few manual orders. They just sit there or start sailing in an irrelevant direction. You have to give them a manual course, then tell them to return to formation, but the ship still goes to the first manual point first. You set weapons free and sensors on at one point only to realize after some time that everyone went back to weapons tight and EMCON etc. etc. It's all very frustrating.
- Nothing to do except play scenarios, of which there aren't that many. Even in the Workshop (still).
- Having never played Cold Waters before, I sort of expected this game to be somewhat akin to Silent Hunter series, in that you could select how granular you wanted your simulation to be, from the largely automated "click-to-win" level to "roleplay as a sonar specialist". It seems this is the first kind and first kind only. There are practically no difficulty/realism settings to adjust your experience. As such, I found that the game started to become repetitive after about 10-12 hours, once the novelty wore off and with no other modes than simple scenarios to play. Now, simulating anything more complex than "click and win" might be beyond the scope of this game and it may never happen. I don't know what the devs are planning. So I suggest you temper your expectations in regards to what the game actually is.
- Some bugs and visual glitches remain. Though nothing I've encountered was game breaking.
- Not a lot of country options other than the usual suspects; would have at least expected that they simply put a country's flag to be flown on the mast of any ship, because they gave you that option. For example, Syria, who barely had a navy to speak of in its entire history is in there but Turkey, which has historically been one of the main actors in NATO with a sizeable navy is not? There's Cuba and Algeria, but no Japan or France?
- Similarly, list of ships they chose to feature is also weird to me; they have the German Type 205 and 206, but not Type 209, of which Germany built more than twice as many as both the 205 and 206 combined! Similarly no MEKO. Which remains one of the most (at least commercially) successful and numerous frigates out there, used by many nations. And no French or Japanese ships either, which I assume will come "soon".
- Now this is a big one for me and it's the performance.
The sea looks fine, but low-poly models, blurry textures, low quality clouds and landscape makes it look like the game was made in 2005. With the exception of the sea, everything else looks like IL-2 with some extra tree coverage, which came out in 2001.
So you can understand my surprise when my system, which runs games like MSFS 2020, DCS and Red Dead Redemption 2 smoothly at up to 60fps on high to ultra settings at 1440p with two monitors, struggles to hit 40-50fps with this game even on a scene with just a couple of clouds, calm seas and 2 ships leisurely cruising. I tried one of the Norwegian scenarios in the Fjord (where Russians are coming with a landing force) with rain, thunder and overcast weather, choppy seas, many more ships and saw the thing dive down to ~15fps area more than a few times. The game also seems crawl to a slide-show (I'm talking sub 15fps) after some time. The longer the game takes, the worse the performance. I'm currently in a scenario that's been running for more than 2 hours and the performance just kept getting worse and worse to what is now 10fps.
Game clearly does not use multithreading, there may or may not be a memory leak somewhere based on the progressively worse perfomance. My overclocked 4.2Ghz Ryzen 5 3600 can't seem to keep up.
Even limiting FPS to 30fps doesn't help, because for some reason, the game doesn't actually lock FPS set in the settings.
They need to do some serious performance optimisation and do it soon. This is becoming insufferable.
Edit: I realized I may have sounded a bit too harsh on the graphics. Please don't misunderstand me, the game looks fine. I am absolutely not saying "the game looks bad, it looks like it was made in 2005" or anything like that. I used the "it looks like it was made in the early 2000s" as a not-so-hyperbole hyperbole to make the point that the game does not justify the cost in computing power compared to how it looks or operates. The point here is the unreasonable performance, not that the game looks ugly (it doesn't... although they could absolutely improve things with higher resolution textures).
Edit #2: Don't pay too much mind to the play time you see next to my name. Actual gameplay is about 10 maybe 15 hours. The rest is letting the game run on pause menu while I went to take a poop or cooked (because no save) and time spent in the mission editor, since there's scant else to do gameplay-wise.
The only problem with that is that the mission editor itself is even more bare bones than the actual gameplay. Extremely limited functionality, unreliable behaviour, bugs and other frustrations make anything but relatively straightforward scenarios where two sides meet and shoot at each other an impossibility and an exercise in frustration.
The more I spend time in this game the more I come to believe the devs simply ran out of money and chose to release the project in its alpha state (can't even call it a minimum viable product) rather than find funding elsewhere.
As a sidenote, this is why I stopped supporting early release titles. I can't keep paying for a concept of a plan of a game and wait 5 years before I can enjoy a couple of hours of frustration-free gameplay.
But anyway. I sort of knew what I was getting into with this one.
Going to keep the recommended rating until the end of the year because I want the devs to succeed. If no meaningful progress by then, will revise to "Not Recommended".
I reiterate my initial judgement that you should not be paying for this game at its current state.

At the time of this review I've got about 120 hours in it and it is easily my favorite naval game. I was a US Navy sailor and served on an Arleigh Burke as well as an Oliver Hazard Perry class ship, the latter being modelled in the game beautifully. This game does a great job at representing the higher level command of naval forces and doesn't bog you down with the fine details your virtual sailors should be taking care of on their ships. The crew will do all the TMA (target motion analysis) stuff off sonar, radar, and ESM contacts and it is very cool to see them classifying things over time. Your virtual sailors will feed you developing information so you can command the task force what to do.
At launch it was a little rough but a bit over a month out and all the major annoyances I had with some mechanics are gone and the developers do a wonderful job at hearing the community and focusing on what they want worked on. At the moment we only have single player scenarios that ship with the game and community developed content in the form of some scenarios as well as vehicle mods. I think this game has great legs to go the distance in the future with the developer's openness to modding. Expect to see in the future wonderful ship creations from modders and from the devs, expect to see a great dynamic campaign that is in the works.
As a former sailor I can say this game is a great representation of naval warfare. Things can be difficult if you treat it like a normal land based RTS but if you pick up a book like Fighting the Fleet or Fleet Tactics, you could actually apply the theories they teach and see it play through in the game world. It is amazing the devs have created a game where you can see how salvo-based warfare works.
I highly recommend this game. I liked it so much I bought an extra copy for a friend.