Warship WWII Review

 Warship WWII is an Android strategy game that lets you be a naval commander: managing ships, resources, battle plans, and diplomacy from your island command center. The game does a good job of sticking to the theme by using the names and models of real naval ships. The music is also epic. Nonetheless, for all Warship WWII’s bells and whistles, it still feels like a chore to play most of the time.

The tutorial was rushed and disorienting. A screen pops up, and then pushing its button makes a “tada” sound followed by a glittery reward screen. I had no idea what the reward meant or what I just did, so I ended up teaching myself the game. You spend most of your time building mines and rigs to gather resources, such as iron, oil, manganese, and later uranium. The resources are used to erect or upgrade your buildings and to manufacture ships. Once you have some ships, you can send them to fight in premade battles. If you do well in those stages, you get increased production in your resources. You can also gather resources by plundering other players or unmanned islands. If all this sounds a bit tedious, that’s because it is, but he game tries to make up for it with a lot of little rewards. If you choose not to skip the battle animations, they can be quite thrilling. Little planes fly off the carriers and drop bombs on their enemies. I enjoyed the sounds of war with explosions, fires, and torpedoes.

There is a community of sorts on the servers. Warship WWII gives you the option to join alliances and coordinate with players from around the world. People are talking and sharing their successes as the game encourages you to. However, there is not much to talk about. The world chat is filled with bored gamers making inappropriate jokes. Your alliance can be better depending on the one you choose. Alliances can have more mature players. There are fewer people, so you can ask for help, but be warned: The devil finds work for idle text messaging. In weeks of playing, watching both the world chat and my alliance chat, I haven’t seen any strategizing. I personally didn’t use any to win battles. I mostly just upgraded my shipyard and command center, built better ships, and then try again. The FAQ page breaks down more of the rock-paper-scissors aspect of the strategy. Battleships do more damage to carrier ships, and submarines are strong against battleships, but submarines are weak against cruisers. However, carrier ships do more damage to other carrier ships.

The problem with the game is that it feels like it’s constantly bugging you. There are constant notifications. The in-app purchases are for gems. You do not need to buy them, but, if you do, you can save a heck of a lot of time. Every building upgrade takes progressively longer. By the time you get past level 10, building the upgrades that you need for better ships can take hours, but you can speed this up with gems. If you are enjoying the game, I think that the price of gems is fairly reasonable.  There are also ways to earn them in the game, such as playing for five days in a row or by binding the game to your email or Facebook. However, with the amount of notifications the game sent to my phone for every little change, I couldn’t bring myself to give Warship WWII any more access.

The problem with Warship WWII is it just gets old fairly fast, and then it starts to feel like a grind. The parts of the game I liked are the battles, which are just okay. I like Android strategy games, but, if I don’t have to use strategy, it’s just sad. Even the strategies themselves aren’t dynamic or clear to the player, which is why I had to navigate myself to the FAQ to figure it out. All in all, if you skip this game, no one will fault you. There’s really nothing special about it.