This game is a small boat filled with really cool ideas afloat on a sea of jank.

If I had to sum up my impressions of this game, it's that it feels like a game made exclusively by history nerds with no game design experience. Building ships is incredibly detailed, and the game is stuffed to the brim with various hulls, components, and so, so many statistics. Every gun can be tuned, and every loading screen has little historical tidbits. But then you actually try and interact with anything and find yourself in agonizing pain from daring to touch the angry porcupine that is this game's UI.

The shipbuilding half is incredibly meaty, allowing the tuning of every tenth of an inch of every plate of armor, every fraction of a gun caliber, and so very many parts. But it is also painfully underoptimized, and the slideshow of a framerate will hurt your ability to design. Placement is also split between both snap points and free placement - and the two often fight eachother, much to your detriment. Some objects will also snap to eachother as well (such as conning towers) seemingly at random, so trying to make small adjustments may end up requiring a complete rebuild from scratch just to shift a single barbette aft a few tics. It's also full of little inefficiencies and quirks, like mirrored side turrets not both moving if you shift one, and various menus sometimes bugging out and overlapping.

Getting out of the drydock and into the open sea, things are initially impressive. Showing great numbers of custom vessels on massive battlefields is a great achievement. And the sound design deserves credit as well - a full rippling broadside is a glorious thing to hear. But it is also a buggy mess - I've seen lots of improperly rendered decals, and ships glowing like the sun or dancing little jigs - not to mention the non-bug visual problems like the oppressively voluminous smoke and wave models that swamp even the stablest ship in calm seas. And the AI - oh dear lord the AI pathing is something horrendous. Not being able to select your organization before a battle, you'll want to begin an engagement by reorganizing the fleet, and then you'll spend the next few minutes listening to screeching metal as the ships run into eachother fruitlessly trying to reform battle lines. Other strange and confusing UI issues also crop up, like trying to drag one division card while another is selected dragging both, for some reason. Or having a penetration chance diagram pop up over a vessel, but only when the camera is specifically following the ship that is firing. Oh, and said popup has a tendency to go off-screen, as no menu cares about where the screen border is. I'd say it's a bit dull to always fight in the open seas - a coast in the distance, or even a tight strait would make for great tactical shifts, but I would loathe to see how the AI would handle such things.

And how about we talk about the campaign. Oh, the campaign. First off, great concept. Balance funds and reputation, trying to stay alive and afloat while researching new techs and trying to keep your fleet modernized. But the UI is even worse here. Even trying to select a fleet can be a hassle - and trying to find fleets, organize refits, navigate the map? Look, trying to cross the Pacific requires going to one side of the map to select the fleet by the Bearing Sea, then going to the other side to select a port in the Phillipines. And did you just miss the click window of the port? Sorry, back to the other side of the map again to go through multiple menus to try again. Wrap-around maps aren't a new invention - it can be done. So why wasn't it done here? Load times are atrocious as well, and with multiple menus to do even the most basic of tasks, it feels like you're taking forever to get even a single step towards your next goal. I've spend 50 hours on a singular campaign so far - and in all honesty, it feels more like 12 hours of actual gameplay, and 38 hours of waiting. And that's not even mentioning the fact that you're beholden to the game itsself to even decide when and if you get to play - most at-war task forces will just motor past eachother like trains in the night without initiating combat, and just when you think you've got their battleship cornered, the government will suddenly sign a peace treaty that you never asked for nor wanted. There's something to be said for the feeling of being an admiral trying to function alongside a fickle government, but it's often just frustrating to completely lack control.

So, many many words just to say: This game has a very solid core. It's detailed, fights are dramatic, and designing is addictive. But it spends so much effort getting in its own way trying to prevent you from playing. Concept A+, Execution F.

It's worth it, but with reservations.

The Good:
- The time period of dreadnoughts and battleships is my favourite in naval history, just for the technology and massiveness of the ships and their firepower. Modern naval combat, while still fun is all long range. This is close-in, intimate, and with massive old-school firepower.

- Ship designer is really good. It's a lot of fun to just spend time in there designing ships, and testing your designs in battle. Best part of the game by far. You can go from trying to design historically accurate ships, to designing the most absurd massive unbalanced beast you can, then trying it in combat right away.

- The battles. They're bombastic, the sound is very well done, and seeing your designs in action is great fun. Effects and sound are good. Hearing your battleship's massive guns firing is spectacular.

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The Meh:
- The Campaign. I need to play it more, but it tough to get into. It's quite boring when you first get in, as there's no war. You spend your first while (In-game months at least) just building up your fleet, researching tech, and moving fleets around. I haven't gotten into war with anyone yet. I'll update this as I experience more of the campaign, but so far it's been tough to get into. I think the goal is to just not get fired as the Admiral. Besides that its more or less a sandbox experience where you do what you want. I could probably provoke nations into combat, but my navy isn't strong enough yet, so i'm pretty sure I would just lose.

- The UI. It's not very good. There's a lot of clicking to do. Movement is weird on the campaign's world map. I should just be able to click on a fleet to select it, and right click to move it like every other strategy game. To split fleets, maybe shift-click on a fleet, then select the ships to move.

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The Bad:
- The game needs a lot more optimisation. The campaign can chug at times. Creating a new campaign takes a few minutes, which seems a bit weird. There must be a lot of computing going on to generate nations and ship designs, etc. Battles can get really laggy with all the particles and effects going on as well. I just had a custom battle with 4 BB's on each side on medium settings, and it was pretty laggy. I have a decent system with 32 gigs of RAM, a 5800X3D CPU, and a Radeon 6800 GPU. My game is installed on an M2 drive as well.

- There seems to be glitches in ship control during combat. Sometimes ships can become non-responsive, and start doing weird maneuvers that mess with your formations and basically loses you the battle. It's best to have ships individually controlled instead of a lead ship that others follow to counter this. Even with that you'll have ships that start turning for no reason and won't respond to any instructions. This is quite frustrating. If its due to combat damage, there should be some type of pop-up or indicator to show you the ship's steering is damaged.

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Conclusion/Summary:
As you might've noticed, I have more bad and meh then good listed. So why am I still recommending it? Because it's unique. There currently isn't another game out there doing what this one does, in terms of ship customisation, combined with a historically accurate world campaign. I would say that this isn't worth picking up at full price. I picked it up during this steam summer sale at 50% off, and it was worth it for that price. I think I will easily get my money's worth.

If you're a massive ship/naval history buff, it might even be worth it for you at full price. It's tough to say, as whether or not its worth it is relative. Despite my aforementioned struggles with the game, I'm having fun and don't regret the purchase.

A fun game that lets you live your childhood dreams of being Admiral.Nimitz.