Steel Horizon (DS) Review

What the DS needs is a solid naval strategy game. Steel Horizon is not it. On paper, the game sounds great: 3D battles, an engaging story, WWII themed, and of course, the ability to command an entire fleet including battleships, submarines, and aircraft carriers. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the fun and strategy part of the strategy game got left out.

The entire game takes place at sea, which is a good thing since commanding a naval fleet would be useless on dry land. The player plays an up and coming captain on the Allies' side during World War II and the enemy as usual is on the Axis side. Yes, it's another World War II game, but that's not what makes this game so mediocre.

For being touted as a strategy game, there's surprisingly very little strategy involved in winning battles. During a turn, the player can move, attack an enemy within range, change the way they're facing, or send their subs off ship to cover more distance. Attacking an enemy launches the player into a different screen where there's a decent 3D representation of the battle on the top screen and a top-down radar picture of the battle on the bottom screen where actions can be executed via the stylus or buttons.

Members of the fleet will automatically defend and attack as long as there are enemies within range, but manual commands can also be issued by tapping an icon for a specific battleship or submarine and then tapping an enemy's icon. There are also special attacks available, but the advantage of using them doesn't seem to sway the battle either way. All this is explained in the tutorial, but it's pretty easy to figure out from one or two battles on your own. What's confusing is trying to figure out which icon belongs to a submarine and which one belongs to say, an aircraft carrier. Knowing that difference is pretty important.

The lack of strategy can be attributed to the fact that sheer numbers usually win, and the enemy AI is fairly stupid. From reading the tutorial, I was under the impression that there was a simple rock-paper-scissors system going on where one unit had advantage over another but was weak against another. All that was thrown out the window because I had no idea what was going on during my first battle, but I still managed to win with a pretty large margin. Granted, the first battle served more as a tutorial, but subsequent battles never really ramped up in difficulty and the balancing of units never came into play. This is actually a good thing in a twisted way because if the battles were any harder, I probably would have gotten frustrated at how similar a lot of the icons look.

One thing that annoyed me while playing was the lag between executing a simple command and actually being able to do it. There's at least a second lag between clicking the move icon and having the movement grid finally show up. This doesn't make much sense to me, since it's not like the computer has to process a resource hogging strategy. Ironically, there doesn't seem to be any loading time or lag when it's time for the computer to move, but then again, as mentioned, there's not that much strategy involved so there might not be anything there to compute.

The game isn't actually as terrible as it sounds, but games are supposed to be fun and this one just isn't. Every mission just ends up being like the previous one in terms of strategy. Unless you're the type of person who likes collecting all sorts of WWII naval memorabilia, I can't see anyone enjoying this game after the first couple of battles. Sure, the 3D scenes are neat to look at, but even that gets tiresome. Steel Horizon is just a one trick pony and even that one trick isn't much to brag about.