Leviathan: Warships Review

“Oh no,” muttered my editor-in-chief after the first hour of Leviathan: Warships. “What?” I returned.
“This is not good,” he moaned.
“What?! For the love of god, what?!” I spat back.
“We’re never going to get any work done anymore, it’s just too addictive,” he admitted. I agreed and we continued to play.

Leviathan: Warships is the new title from Pieces Interactive and Paradox Interactive in which you control a fleet of ships in a turn-based strategy, naval combat game. Upon first glance, it looked like a fairly difficult game; a game I wouldn’t get on with and would just lay dormant in my Steam library for the rest of eternity. After my first few rounds against some friends, I was hooked, line and sinker.

The premise is simple. You take it in turns to control your fleets to complete objectives. The game is played out in stints of 10 seconds following a planning stage. The planning stage can vary from 30 seconds to 7 days allowing for either fast paced annihilation or methodically placed moves, both having their pros and cons.

You play from a top down perspective and control each of your ships individually with your mouse, accessing all the ships have to offer via a pie menu. This shows all the offensive and defensive armaments that you have equipped on your boats along with your directional controls. Whilst this can be a bit overwhelming at first, after a few games, it becomes second knowledge.

Each of your weapons have a set direction (depending on where you place them on the ship) and a range. Once a ship enters that range, the weapon will automatically fire but you can override this by either manually targeting from the pie menu or turn off automatic firing, so, you know, you don’t shoot your team mate.

All of this weaponry needs to be placed onto your ships and to do this, you have a fairly comprehensive editor. It works off a points system. You have 8,000 points at your disposal - each ship will take up points along with the different weapons, defenses and sections of your vessels (yes, you can change the hull, stern etc. to suit your strategic needs) you equip but why not just go full out and put as much as you can on? It’s all about strategy. When you go into a game, you can select whether you will allow small, medium or large fleets. Each of these have their own maximum point limits. If you believe you have a solid small fleet, but all your friends have gone full out, create a small fleet match and force them to make substitutions.

There are few game modes that you can choose from, all available to play either solo or co-op, campaign, challenge, points and assassination. The campaign sets you out to complete an objective with increasing difficulty. My advice: go through it in co-op with at least one friend, it’s very hard otherwise. There are five different challenge maps for you to try your hand at but believe me when I say, they’re no easy pickings. The points section is a skirmish in which you set the rules: how many players, points allowed, winning criteria, planning time etc. Lastly is assassination mode in which you choose your fleet as normal except you are given a small, weak boat to look after. If that boat gets sunk, it’s game over. A great twist on the classic skirmish and a lot of fun.

If all of this wasn’t enough, Pieces Interactive have allowed you to take your nautical escapades on the move with cross-platform play. Leviathan: Warships is available on PC, Mac, iOS and Android and uses cloud saving which means you can leave your PC, grab your Android tablet and continue your battles. This makes the different timed planning stages even more perfect. I am currently waiting for the Android version to be released, but when it is, I will be setting up a game with a one day planning time for my friends and I, letting me make my moves during work breaks. A great addition for this title.

The graphics, although not groundbreaking, are very visually appealing. The thing I most enjoyed were the minor details that, unless you happened to fall upon them, would go unnoticed, such as the swaying of the buoys in the ocean, or a beach ball washing up in the drift. This follows over to the soundtrack as well. Whilst the sounds of the different weapons don’t seem out of the ordinary, they also don’t sound like they’ve been downloaded from a stock website and played on a loop. Something else I really loved was, once your ship has been damaged, if you zoom into said ship, you can hear the sirens going off. All it was missing was hearing the sailors screaming and jumping overboard!

All in all, Leviathan: Warships is a fantastic game both for the social commuter and the hardcore keyboard warrior. Customisability is key here and it’s all about how you strategically choose your ships and armaments. I can really see myself sinking hours into this - I thought I could make it an entire review without making a boat pun, but alas, I had to go and wreck it. Sorry.