Steel Horizon
Score: 79% ESRB: Everyone 10+ Publisher: Konami Developer: Konami Media: Cartridge/1 Players: 1 - 2 Genre: Turn-Based Strategy
Graphics & Sound: The smell of salt water. The cool winds. The smell of burning metal. Nothing like a little battle at sea. In Steel Horizon, take command of groups of ships and carry out your orders. Reclaim ports and shipyards to increase you naval prowess. Overall, I thought the graphics were well done. They used static stills for dialogue screens that I felt showed a good amount of polish. The opening movies were well choreographed and added a lot of character to the game. The actual gameplay has two different looks. The Map or Strategy Mode has just enough detail. The Battle Mode or Tactical Mode is a little garbled and provides a lot of visuals that are compressed and clunky. You don't really need to rely on them, but if they are in there, then they should be clean. The music was the imperial naval march that I would have expected, with its drum cadence and sweeping synth music. There were no voiceovers or dialogue. All character-driven story in the Single Player Mode is textual and only provides about three to four words per line.
Gameplay: Steel Horizon is a turn-based strategy game that can be played either as single player or head to head against an opponent. During your turn, you will have time to move your ships, assign battle groups, and attack nearby enemies. There are two different modes during gameplay, Strategy and Tactical. During the Strategy Mode, you are allowed to move your ships and get them into position. You also have the ability to reassign ships to different groups and check on their status. After you have placed all of your ships the way you want them, and barring any actual combat, you end your turn and allow your opponent to do the same. Tactical Mode is engaged whenever you enter combat. Combat itself is taken care of in real time. During battle, you target the enemy vessels and use whatever special tactics are provided to you by the ships in the group. Battles happen quickly and can be quite lopsided if you do not pay attention to what types of ships are going against one another. To simplify this, there is a paper, rocks, scissors relationship that you will have to insure sure you are not sending paper boats to battle against scissors. You have the ability to upgrade your fleet. With each successful mission you complete in Single Player, you earn points that can be used at the end of the mission to upgrade with. There are 15 different ships that will be at your disposal. There are Ports and Shipyards in the game that you will need to use to either produce the resources or build new ships. You will need to either claim the points of interest or take them over from the enemy. Taking over these ports is like any other capture the flag scenario. Park a ship outside the control square and hold it for a designated period of time.
Difficulty: Steel Horizon's Single Player version moves along very much like a really long tutorial game. Each mission adds new elements and slowly builds way to fairly complex gameplay. There were no massive jumps in difficulty. That is not to say that it doesn't work its way up to providing a challenging game. If you want a full out challenge, though, you are going to have to go head to head with a human player. This is a multi-card, 1 - 2 player game, so someone else is going to need to pick the game up to play. I highly recommend that you do. There are few games that I like to play over a link, but this one with all of the ship types and simple match up gameplay is a good one to play against friends.
Game Mechanics: Steel Horizon breaks down into three types of vessel classes. These three classes have a huge tactical advantage over one another. Battle class vessels have an advantage over Destroyer class vessels. Destroyer class vessels have an advantage over Torpedo class vessels. Within the actual vessel classes, ships have a slight advantage over each other in their class. For example, in the Battle class, the Carrier is the top ship having an advantage over all the other ships. The Battleship has an advantage over the Battle Cruiser, and so forth. Ignoring this can cost you heavily in battle, so pay attention to the ships that make up your battle groups. I enjoyed the single player portion well enough, but all of the fun gameplay comes form the Naval Chess game it provides in multiplayer. It is not the only reason to pick it up. Both game modes made it an enjoyable title to play. Anchors away.
-WUMPUSJAGGER, GameVortex Communications AKA Bryon Lloyd
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