PT Boats: Knights of the Sea
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea has finally been released for an overall disappointing game that works too hard at being what it eventually turns out to be, a naval combat game using smaller torpedo boats but as part of a larger wargame.
Ratings:
Graphics & Audio: 22/25,
Gameplay: 10/25,
Creativity 10/25,
Fun 15/25
Total: 57/100
PT Boats Knights of the Sea has been developed by Akella and published in the United States by Battlefront.com for a final release that has been a little too long in the making. The PC only game for some reason took awhile longer to release and something has been lost in the interim.
The game was announced and I have eagerly awaited its release but over the last six to nine months it has continued to be postponed with a final release in 2010. PT Boats is a bit disappointing in several areas but overall shows promise as long as future additions and updating occurs.
PT Boats: Knights of the Seas is a tactical simulator using the small patrol boats of the Northern Seas during World War II instead of the more familiar PT Boats of the Pacific waters. The game is split into two distinct types of gaming, first with a 2 dimensional map controlling your whole fleet using map controls to direct your ships.
The second area is first person control of a PT boat or other ship from the view point of a helmsman, gunner or torpedo officer for first person tactical gaming. The game uses a campaign or multiplayer gaming with the multiplayer only available over a LAN network so you can’t readily play online against others.
This means unless you have another gamer nearby your forced to play the campaign only and this is further constrained by the fact that the campaign can only be played one mission after the other by successfully completing each mission. There are no single missions you can jump into and have fun with single play against the computer, only campaign missions one after the other.
The campaign starts with some tutorials which are actually just starting missions with a few training hints here and there as you learn controls, jumping from position to position and firing torpedoes. The first three missions include tutorials in both the 3 dimensional mode and the 2 dimensional overview map for fighting the enemy for a good learning experience.
The game does well with either method but for an overall campaign things get a bit too confusing and out of hand as you introduce more boats to handle in your own fleet. The game gets a bit too over complicated as you introduce more than two or three boats in your fleet and things get really bad when you’re trying to take on more than just equal opponents such as bigger ships.
In the first few missions your fighting against battleships and destroyers even though you are only doing some spotting and quick scouting movements then quickly leaving the area. Other missions include rescuing fellow sailors and defending secret equipment or documents from capture or escorting supply ships.
Missions get continuously harder and the problem is you cannot just go on with the campaign until you finish a mission successfully and some of the missions are very hard. One mission has you rescuing crew members from a ship where you need to simply maneuver one of your ships near the ship to be rescued.
The AI is supposed to register your presence and set the job of rescue as complete but I had problems getting the game to acknowledge the job as done. I found others on the internet also had problems with this objective complete tasking in the games engine and difficulty with having these objectives being marked as complete.
Other missions had very particular or picky mission objectives that sometimes didn’t register or get completed as I thought they should. This is annoying, especially when the game is difficult with a bit too much on your plate at any particular time the further you get into the campaign.
I found the game hard to play not only for the games AI but just the fact that there is sometimes just too much to do at once and sometimes things did not happen realistically. One mission wants you to identify ships in a fleet but you have to get within a few hundred yards of each in order for the game to acknowledge you see the ship and can identify it.
This is further complicated by the fact that the mission sets a couple of torpedo boats at you if you get close and the ships nwith guns start to hose you down if you also get close to them. Identifying a ship can be done from at least a half mile away or further depending on conditions but in the game it can only happen from much closer, too close for tactical use.
Other missions also had unrealistic events that did not lend itself to a realistic game overall but other things like ballistics and the basic environment did work out well. The games graphics and effects worked well and PT Boats does need a pretty good computer to run on so no low system requirements will be able to squeak by here.
You will want to have a system that exceeds the system requirements outlined by Battlefront or Akella and are closer to the recommended ones. Any games that render water along with the other things like ships, planes and more need to have a good system as there is more being rendered here than just a game that has land and vehicles.
PT Boats also goes underwater using a view from below so there can be even more rendered here and your system has to be up to par and then some to keep up and give acceptable performance. Audio is fairly good but without much in the way of background sounds when you’re at sea or very little voice narration it is not a great way to tell for audio quality.
The game is missing on overall sound variety with decent sea sounds of water crashing against your boat as you speed along with good engine noise but not much else. You do have machine gun and torpedo launch effects that sound good but not much else to compare with.
The graphics and audio are pretty good overall with boat and crew details that are great and the only thing for graphics that is a little less than highly positive is the explosions and bullet hits. The audio is also a little less than outstanding but acceptable as far as things go but the real kicker for this game is you need a better system than the minimum requirements say on the Battlefront website.
PT Boats plays well on my AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ system with the processor overclocked to 3 GHz and an NVIDIA 9800GTX+ graphics card with 4 GB of memory. I think that going much lower on just about anything from my system would make the game if not unplayable at least less enjoyable.
You may also be able to play the multiplayer game area on some servers online that host games in a LAN environment but I am not sure as I could not find any setup. I think this might be something to look forward to in the future as more get the game and work toward getting some kind of public servers setup but it does not look good for now.
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea is a decent game and as long as the company does continue to support the game, releases a mission editor and maybe some other modification support it is worth taking a look. PT Boats does put a little too much on your plate at times with not enough automatic play on your fleets side and some very difficult missions for an overall very mixed game.
I hope the publisher and developer does release more parts of the game and continues to support it but until an editor is released you might want to hold off on purchasing PT Boats: Knights of the Sea. PT Boats: Knights of the Sea is available as a digital download from Battlefront.com and as a DVD with game manuals delivered through the mail or both.