Vampire! Vampire! Vampire! Enemy anti-ship missiles are inbound and you have maybe a minute to react. While I will always love flight and aviation just a little bit more, I also have a soft spot for ships and naval history. What can I say? I find all of this stuff fascinating and the Hunt for the Red October is among my favourite movies of all time. When MicroProse offered to let me get a sneak peak at the still in development Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age, I jumped at the chance. I’ve swapped out my aviators for an admiral’s hat temporarily so let’s have a look at Sea Power!

About the game

Before I get underway with this preview, I wanted to make it clear that I’m not yet ready to write a full review of this title. This sim is nearing its early access release, however, it is still a preview and not the finished product. There are a few rough edges here and there and so what I’m writing about right now is not necessarily going to represent what we see when its finished.

Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age is a Unity based naval combat simulation game developed by Triassic Games. The game is made by a small three person team that call themselves Triassic Games and is being published by MicroProse. The game is something of a follow on to the submarine themed Cold Waters and is considered by some to be a spiritual successor to the classic Jane’s Fleet Command (from 1999).

The game is set during the Cold War era between the 1960s and 1980s with a map that spans the world and scenarios set primarily in the North Atlantic, Persian Gulf, Gulf of Tonkin and Mediterranean.

The game boasts 150 units modeled including ships, helicopters, and aircraft, plus 130 weapon systems and 50 ground objects. That compliment includes battleships, cruisers, frigates, destroyers and submarines as well as helicopters, maritime patrol aircraft, interceptors, strike aircraft, and on the list goes. I’m also particularly impressed that the sim includes quite a selection of civilian/non-combat objects that include airliners, cargo vessels, fishing ships and more.

How it plays

Sea Power is a real time game with a mix of management and strategy that has you clicking on the map to issue orders for navigation, attack and defense as well as using a menu along the bottom of the screen as well as a right click accessible menu to access all kinds of different options. You can issue a general order such as “weapons free” or “weapons tight” to give the directed vessel specific rules of engagement. You can tell your ships and aircraft to turn on or off their radars, sonars, towed arrays and decoys, and on the list goes. If the ship or aircraft had the capability, this game seems to have captured it.

The interface is a mix of pop-up windows giving access to different kinds of information as well as a primary 3D view that gives you a great view of the action. It’s a fairly simple design but it manages to work well mixing eye candy with visualized data and tactical information.

Locations of friendly and enemy units are all displayed by icons on a map as well as less certain information such as a radar or electronic signature or even a vague area or bearing to a submerged target without triangulated information. It’s all part of the fog of war that this sim seems to excel at.

Invariably, battle will be joined and your ships and aircraft open up with everything they have. Big guns, small guns, CIWS batteries, a vast array of missiles, and torpedoes are all in the mix. The action is intense with the detection of enemy missiles or torpedoes causing you to jump into action defending your ships while launching a counterstrike at the same time or the tense moments leading up to your own surprise attack and wondering if it will work and if you’ll be able to pull it off.

This sim includes carrier battlegroups in the mix so you can launch era appropriate aircraft including the F-14 Tomcat, A-7 Corsair II, and A-6 Intruder. Or maybe you’re operating a destroyer or cruiser with a SH-2 Seasprite onboard. All of these can be given orders either as a formation or individually. That Seasprite comes in handy in a variety of scenarios where its torpedoes can be dropped on an enemy submarine and its sonar buoys can help detect the enemy.

Sea Power has a great time compression system that can operate up to 100x normal time for when you have little going on and a lot of territory to cover. Some scenarios can last the span of a day in real time so you probably aren’t going to sit there and wait for things to happen. The time compression lets you get to the good parts while still directing the overall course of the mission. Sometimes the action will limit time compression down to 30x but that’s still quite fast.

Fog of war

I absolutely love strategy games where knowledge and positioning is a big part of the experience and Sea Power has this in spades.

This sim has realistically simulated sensors and they play a huge role in modern era naval combat. This is less about spotting ships on the horizon and closing in for close-in gun fights, though that is certainly possible, but its more about longer range engagements not unlike the difference between WWII air combat and more modern era beyond visual range air combat.

Different types of radars and sonar systems are all individually modeled, their power output and detection capabilities are a huge factor in finding the enemy. At the same time, radar emissions can make you show up on your enemy’s screen in a big way. This is the case for ships, aircraft and submarines so there’s a very multi-layered experience on tap here.

While some scenarios will give you a lot of information ahead of time, others play out over a prolonged period of time and building a picture of the enemy’s capabilities on the surface, in the air and under the water is going to be key to a successful mission.

I mentioned earlier that civilian traffic is a part of the collection of units available in this game and that helps muddy the waters, pardon the pun, quite a bit. You may be engaging enemy ships but incur some significant penalties in the after action report if you accidentally engage a neutral ship or aircraft. Airliners, fishing vessel, and cargo ships may be mixed in forcing you to get a better ID on the enemy before engaging them.

The learning curve

The good news is that Sea Power has a fairly shallow learning curve to get the basics under control. I mean operating the camera, clicking the menus, and telling ships what to do. A few clicks of the mouse and you’re getting started. Once you’ve got the basics of controlling and ordering different units around, you can begin to conduct operations relatively quickly. My first couple of missions, easier ones on the difficulty scale, went fairly well despite losses that were at least partially attributed to my lack of knowledge.

The curve ramps up quickly once you’re past the basics as more difficult scenarios will test your intimate knowledge of how ships, aircraft, and submarines work. You are really tested on your ability to understand the battle space in all three domains. The game includes some fairly sophisticated modeling of how sonar works for example so you may get a sonar contact at long distances or not see them at all depending on where the submarine is and what layer of water its in. Not knowing the subtleties of the tactics required to sort that out can be difficult to overcome. I know some of the details here but not all of them.

The lengthy list of capabilities of each vessel that you’re operating and their associated weapon systems also means that you may be mismanaging your available weapon stores leaving you short of munitions later on. Choosing the right tactics, the right weapons, setting up your formation of ships, or launching countermeasures at the right moment require significant amounts of information and knowledge.

That’s not a bad thing! I’m a flight simmer, I love the complexities involved and learning how and why stuff works. Sea Power very much leans into that need for both breadth and depth of knowledge. But it does mean that you won’t just pick it up and be the best Admiral around unless you already have that kind of deep knowledge.

Fortunately, Sea Power comes with a pop-up encyclopedia that is perhaps the best I’ve seen in a sim game. Click on any unit and get the encyclopedia with all kinds of information and data on that particular unit including its sensors, performance, and weapons capabilities. Hyperlinks for most of those items let you drill down into the specifics giving you range and use capabilities. Does this missile have multiple modes? Can it be used to strike a sea target and an air target? Building up your own knowledge base is the longer difficulty curve that you have to climb.

In short, you can get going and generally not know what you’re doing and watch as the ships duke it out but if you really want to survive and succeed you’ll need to learn quite a bit about the how and why.

The visuals

Sea Power’s graphics are well done though not necessarily the most modern. There are aspects to Sea Power that are slightly dated with lower resolution textures and less detailed 3D models than you may expect for some games coming out in 2024. That said, there is an awful lot of work that has gone into refining the visual elements of this game that I appreciate.

While the 3D models could have more polygons than they do and texture resolution could be a tad bit higher, that doesn’t stop the ships from looking magnificent and a lot of that has to do with how they’ve approached the details. From the accurately represented flags on each ship to the rotating radar dishes to the extremely smooth animation for just about every operation on the ship, it’s clear that an immense amount of work went into making these ships look and function they way that they should and its very satisfying to watch.

Give the order to launch a missile for example and you’ll see the full animation as the missile is moved into positioned and fired. Sea Power is also fantastic at rendering long lasting smoke trails.

Some ships are more satisfying than others with some of the Soviet ships in particular having some fairly elaborate firing sequences. Large missiles are raised up in their housing, the caps are removed, and suddenly this giant missile is flying out of the bay. It looks stunning.

The same is the case for submarines and aircraft. I particularly love some of the complex animations for helicopters as the hangar door slowly opens, the helicopter is rolled out onto the pad, the blades fold out, and then the helicopter powers up and takes off. Some aircraft movements are a bit stiff feeling and its obvious this isn’t a flight simulation in that respect. They are still more than adequate for purpose.

Environmental effects are pretty good too. I haven’t seen any rain showers yet but the sim does have a mix of clouds and clear skies with many scenarios trending towards the moody side. The sun and moon rise and set and visually look stunning. Fire and smoke effects from the ships and missiles are generally good though its clear that they are using older technologies to achieve it.

On my reasonably high end system, Sea Power runs beautifully without skipping a frame in even the most intense scenarios that I’ve experienced. Any criticism of lower visual fidelity is erased when you feel just how fluid this all feels.

The sound and the music

The sound work is quite good too. From the eerie sounds of various kinds of sonar pings when the camera is under water to ship noises, jet and rocket engines, guns firing, and CIWS roaring away as missiles close in, there’s quite a good array of sounds on tap here.

There are voice overs, one for the Warsaw Pact and one for the NATO side, and they are useful at giving you important information. The terminology is accurate and authentic which is great too. They are a little mechanical and repetitive over time which may annoy some. I’ve read that additional voices are being added to the mix which would be a great thing as it would break up some of the repetition.

Sea Power also has a dynamic music system with the soundtrack deriving inspiration from a mix of The Hunt for the Red October’s Basil Poledouris and Crimson Tide’s Hans Zimmer to name just two possible inspirations. It feels appropriately nautical and tense with the action driving the music. It blends into the background but it also helps keep the tension and the theme and I love it!

Early access

Sea Power is about to launch into early access and thanks to the Steam page we know what the development team’s plans are. According to that information, they intend to be in early access for approximately 8-12 months.

Additional features will include the ability to save a game at any time as well as a dynamic campaign with theatre scale operations. That second item is planned for alpha launch in Q2 2025 while the saved game system is coming in Q1. According to their roadmap, they also plan to work on virtually all aspects of the experience from localization options to tutorial missions to improved camera and mechanics. Though on many of those points they’ve already got quite a robust setup in place minus the tutorial missions which I do think would be a huge help in getting people ready to take on some of the more complex scenarios.

The dev team have reportedly confirmed that future DLC packages are being explored with one based on the Royal Navy almost a certainty.

Final thoughts

While everything that you’ve just read about Sea Power : Naval Combat in the Missile Age is based on a pre-release version of the game, its still enourmously impressive to me. This is, admittedly, the first game I’ve played in this genre and its making me think that I’ve really missed out on past experiences. Managing a fleet of ships, small and large, together with their associated aircraft is a fascinating and immersive experience and while I can’t compare Sea Power to its predecessors, I can say that it has offered me quite a bit of sim gameplay that I won’t soon forget!

This is going to appeal to an interesting cross section of gamers. Simulation fans like myself I think are most drawn in by the appeal of realistically simulated systems and real time gameplay. Strategy fans are going to enjoy the big picture feel of the sim. This won’t be for everyone and some flight sim fans may have difficulty with stepping out of the machine and thinking bigger. As fun as it is to order up the whole carrier air group to take on the enemy, sometimes you just want to F-14 in the mix. It’ll be up to you to figure out if that appeals.

This game is set to come into early access in just a few days and is slated for launch on November 12, 2024. Sea Power won’t be launching as a finished product, as is typical of sims these days, but I can tell you what was already on offer was terrific fun. If the developers stick to their simulated guns and keep refining this, I am willing to bet that this will be a fondly remembered title in 20-25 years just as Jane’s Fleet Command was.

Check out Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age on Steam.

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