Rule the Waves 3

“Incredibly frustrating mechanics and the AI always seems to know where your fleets are and send endless waves of aircraft to sink your fleet while your own aircraft can attack with 30 strong and miss everything.”

“What I can't stand is the stupidity of the user flow, crazy selection mechanics, weird window mechanics and behaviors, lack of hotkeys except for a rare few, arbitrary submenus and subwindows, and a ship designer that can only be described as a hot mess of the arcane, the archaic and the unfinished.”

“The information the game gives you to make decisions on is lacking, or outright false, and the devs haven't even implemented a tutorial for many mechanics, with a poorly thought out UI that doesn't give you the information you want.”

“In the airpower era, you should be able to plan missions — for example, timing your arrival at night to avoid air attacks — but you can’t.”

“Submarine warfare is semi-automated, which leads to an overabundance of surface fleet raiding missions that become rapidly ahistorical.”

“Every naval battle is unbalanced, regardless of how many ships there are in the area, what your fleet organisation looks like, or what the mission is.”

“This is a great example of how to make a game that looks like it has a lot of depth and meaningful optimization/decision-making, but bungled so horribly that none of those decisions actually matter.”

“When you look at your build screen you see how much a gun has been upgraded in performance over earlier models, but just how much that affects performance is completely unknown and there is no mechanic to discover that information.”

“You have no idea what effect captains and admirals have on performance, if any. Your crews advance from poor to elite rating over time but what, if any, effect that has on performance is completely unknown. There is no mechanic to check on performance of the crew.”

“Thus in the end you've sailed from 'from tedium to apathy and back again' only to discover that the game has almost no replay value.”

“Maybe more playable nations such as the Netherlands and Portugal?”

“Love the game, I have started so many games and failed. I love the fact I can just restart and expect that to happen. You can't rush the game and enjoy it; the game prefers if you take hours to design your ship to counter opposing ship design, and not just make it faster or have a little bit of armor kind of improvements. It's always a replayable game, very detailed in many aspects.”

“Some interesting ideas, but the game is poorly documented and buggy.”

“I want to love this game but it has various glitches related to save games and ship designs on Windows 11.”

“Designing a ship is a legitimate strain and buggy at best; I tried designing a simple destroyer and it wouldn't let me because it said I failed the requirements of speed, size, and needing torpedoes.”

“Air power in this game is historically accurate at its best (in that it wrecks everything) and horribly tedious at its worst.”

“As it stands, the mildly interesting combat system is not worth the frustrating, laborious, tedious process of building up a navy, which is ironic because in games like Ultimate Admirals and From the Depths, building the navy is often the best part.”

“Only real complaint is that battles can get tedious, both in terms of a single battle pointlessly dragging on for various reasons (e.g., a chase that won't end), and multiple battles playing out very similarly and getting boring; the game will give you many too easy or too hard missions that you can't auto-resolve to skip.”

“There's no music in any form either, it's simply a quiet white sheet of paper with small text.”