While Warships supports offline functionality against an AI, it was mainly designed for online play – teams of two fighting it out over the high-seas, using everything from Railguns, to mines that spawn mighty sea lizards that will gobble up everything and anything. There are two main game modes when it comes to the competitive element – Assassination and Points. Points is a lot simpler – you score points against your opponents by sinking their ships, and the first team to reach a set points goal wins. You can set it though so that the point goal basically requires total annihilation. Assassination sees each side get a flag ship (in 2 v 2, there are two flagships per side), and the team that loses all of their flagships loses. This alters the dynamic vastly, as strategies change to become about protecting or sinking a specific vessel, as opposed to general all out warfare.
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| Having a ship caught out of position can be devastating – you really have to work on your strategies |
Before you even think of going into a match though, you need think of your fleet and what you’re going to bring in. Depending on the host preferences, matches have three different point limits, typically, ‘Small’, ‘Medium’ and ‘Large’, with Large being 8000 points. Much like table-top games like Warhammer, your flotilla can’t exceed the given point limit. Each ship chassis has a base point cost, and then additional costs can be added depending on what weapons you put on the ship, and how you customise the hull. Each chassis also comes with a limit on how many armaments it can carry, with the smaller ships only having four slots, and the big ships 12. Still, each ship chassis has more potential ‘slots’ than it does armament quotas, so there’s a lot to think about regarding where you want your weapons to go – forward facing? Broadside? Do you want to cover the rear? Also, using up all 12 slots on a big ship can make it mighty expensive, so maybe you won’t want to use all of the slots. Modules are split into two categories – Offensive and Defensive. Offensive is pretty self-explanatory – you have a lot of different guns, ranging from close range lasers, close – long range cannons, Railguns, artillery, rockets etc... whilst Defensive modules can be anything from a cloak, to shields, to different kind of mines. There are a lot of potential options, a lot of combinations, and even though everyone starts off with template fleets, the only way you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t is through a lot of trial and error.
There is a single-player component to Leviathan, which consists of nine missions that you can do either by yourself or co-operatively with up to three other people. There’s some semblance of a narrative, but it’s all vague scene-setting stuff and the campaign’s main purpose is to teach you how to manage your boats and their various abilities differently. I got spanked on the first level on my first try, and when I brought in a fellow writer for back-up, we just about made it through. Then on the third mission I accidentally went over some mines he’d placed just as this monster of a ship came into view. Leviathan can never be considered casual, or ‘easy’, except through the short-comings of your opponents. In single-player, the AI is as ruthless as it is effective, and it proves to be a very good way of learning the game. Or getting frustrated by it: depends on your temperament, I guess.
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| it's fairly self-explanatory, and you can spend ages playing around with different configurations |
As we mentioned above, Paradox don’t really do casual games, but that doesn’t mean they can’t create something that targets the more ‘casual’ player. Anyone playing Leviathan can have several matches going at once, and the way you can tweak Order timers etc… means that you can have matches that go on for days, just because everyone is given enough time to submit their orders (say if they have a day job). The other big ‘thing’ with Leviathan is that it’s Paradox’s first foray into what they call ubiquitous, or platform agnostic, gaming. Leviathan is designed to work on everything from a PC or Mac, to iOS or Android mobile devices. You can even play in the same game using all these devices, and the interfaces across each one (namely touch vs. mouse and keyboard) have been adapted accordingly. The dream is for a player to be able to start a game on their PC at home, and then continue it on a mobile or tablet whilst they are out of the office or home, and even go to another PC and pick up where you left off.
On a technical level, playing cross platform works perfectly – the only real barrier to this would be the quality of the internet connection on the local end. The only thing you really have to contend with is the differing price points – the PC version costs £7.99 currently, whilst the Android/iOS version is half the price. From what we can tell, there’s little to no difference between the versions, and at the moment there’s no way to only buy the game once. Getting Google, Apple, Microsoft et al to play ball on that one is going to be the biggest challenge this game faces.
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| It's best to stick together in team matches – strength in numbers |
Leviathan’s simplicity is its strength – the games not that hard to make, it’s not that hard to learn, it doesn’t cost that much to acquire, yet it takes hours to master, hours to fiddle and tweak your ship and fleet loadouts. At the time of writing there weren’t any major bugs to content with, only slightly depopulated servers during certain times of the day. There’s also the issue of lag – the game doesn’t really handle lag that well, and sometimes the bit where the orders are played out can take so long that you actually miss your chance to commit orders for the next round. This is only really a problem if your game has really short order timers, but if you get stuck in this lag cycle, it can ruin a game for you.
The only other question about Leviathan is –where do they go from here? The obvious place would be new ship types, weapons etc… in the form of DLC, maybe even some maps, but to really keep people’s interest up, they’re going to have to start thinking outside the box a bit, because eventually, the competitive element amongst the community will find that winning strategy that defeats all strategies. If nothing new is injected into the game to shake things up a bit, then most of the enjoyment from this game is going to be ruined. Still, a great start to a great title, and we look forward to seeing what else the team has in store.
LEVIATHAN: WARSHIPS VERDICT
The only other question about Leviathan is –where do they go from here? The obvious place would be new ship types, weapons etc… in the form of DLC, maybe even some maps, but to really keep people’s interest up, they’re going to have to start thinking outside the box a bit, because eventually, the competitive element amongst the community will find that winning strategy that defeats all strategies. If nothing new is injected into the game to shake things up a bit, then most of the enjoyment from this game is going to be ruined. Still, a great start to a great title, and we look forward to seeing what else the team has in store.
TOP GAME MOMENT
Getting a good hit with the Railgun is always satisfying, as it can be terribly hard to wield.
