Jane's Fleet Command - 10/10/99
by: John Rowe

Naval Contemplation more like:

I’ll get it off my chest right at the start of this segment; the game play is so very, very dull. It’s meant to be a simulation of strategic naval warfare yet no one seemed to bother explaining that to the programmers. Basically you can forget about any type of strategy here, it’s just a very slow version of missile command, after 5 minutes you can expect at least 10 missiles heading you way, so obviously you have to shoot them down. You fire at them; they fire at you, you fire back again ad infinitum. Eventually you will have lost either all your boats or they will have lost theirs, then your job is either complete or you have to find another group of boats or maybe a ship that’s running away. When it comes to this bit you might as well just turn the game off now, the pace is incredibly slow infact I’ve seen turtles move faster.

The biggest killer apart from bad implementation and slow game play is the horrible specs for this game, just look at them, a 300 with 64 mb ram??, for a small 3d window and a dodgy map screen, what’s up with that. That spec is higher then Total Annihilation’s but it certainly doesn’t show you what all the processor power is used for. It can’t be the A.I. because I didn’t actually notice any and it can’t be the graphics because they are about 4 years out of date, so it’s very odd. There is a saving grace to this game however, it’s the information section of the game, go here and you can learn all about the vessels used aswell as the other craft used, all very nice and such like but a valid use for it all could be argued of course.

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