Battlefleet Gothic: Armada - The game of epic naval strategy (in space) that is none of those things.
Is it epic? No.
The game limits you to a handful of ships (usually 3-4) which is both tremendously underwhelming if you were looking forward to commanding you know...an armada, and necessitates (or is perhaps a consequence of? Which came first, the dead duck pretending to be aBattlefleet Gothic: Armada - The game of epic naval strategy (in space) that is none of those things.
Is it epic? No.
The game limits you to a handful of ships (usually 3-4) which is both tremendously underwhelming if you were looking forward to commanding you know...an armada, and necessitates (or is perhaps a consequence of? Which came first, the dead duck pretending to be a chicken, or the rotten egg?) the other aspects of the game.
Is it naval? No.
BFG was always a naval combat game given a space skin. That's why it was always 2D and the rules never dealt with issues like persistence of momentum in a vacuum. That's a good thing, suspend disbelief and it helps keep the game simple and accessible.
Unfortunately the units in BFG do not behave anything like ships. Sail powered, motorised or space. They're more like rally cars with very poor tire grip.
Ships do not move in a deliberate fashion, instead every vessel from the smallest gunboat to the largest battleship wheels, skids and turns on a dime in fractions of a second. It sort of defeats the point of having things like weapon facings or positioning at all.
Is it strategic? No.
The consequence of having very few units to control and allowing them virtually complete freedom to re-orient at a moment's notice means that there is no room for strategy or planning. The best laid plans can be undone at a moment's notice and setting up ambushes or positioning for running broadsides is actually rendered a detriment.
The emergency manuever mechanic will take up the bulk of your gametime. The depleting and constantly replenishing power bar is generous enough to repeated instant 180 degree turns on even the biggest ships and once finally exhausted, it replenishes in mere seconds.
The remainder of your time will be spent managing cooldowns. And oh my, does this game have cooldowns. It heard you liked cooldowns, so it assigned cooldowns for your cooldowns, so you could manage cooldowns while you wait for your cooldowns.
Did I mention cooldowns? They're a thing.
There's a cooldown to make your shooting better (on every ship). A cooldown to take damage better (on every ship). There's even a cooldown to reduce your cooldowns! (and yes, its on every ship!). Why these are necessary at all is beyond me. Since its essential to use them constantly they'd be much better off being rolled into the base stats ("But then what buttons will people press?!?!".
This is before you even get into the plethora of active abilities that actually deserve their own special buttons. Firing a torpedo spread is a tactical decision and ought to be left up to the player (ironically this is the one instance where the auto-cast actually does an okay job of managing it for you). Unfortunately, most of these tactical weapons are completed wasted due to the scale of the game. There are no battle lines to break up, no target rich areas to saturate. Just three enemy ships pirouetting about like mechanical ballet dancers who you'll never hit at anything but point blank range.
And then we enter the much anticipated veterancy system. Rather than using this to allow ships to do what they did before, but be better at it, the game has opted to add...MORE COOLDOWNS! There're a small number of passive veteran abilities but only two or three will be useful on any one ship. And then you're forced to purchase yet more special buttons. Special buttons to regenerate your shields (could've been passive, or conditional and auto-cast) special buttons to make yourself invincible. Special buttons to throw out yet MORE inaccurate AOE effects that would've been excellent choices in a game of epic naval combat, but are completely wasted in this badly conceived skirmish game.
In many respects its repeating the errors that plagued Rome 2 - nobody wants micro in a strategy game. They want to control a huge army/fleet and direct the flow of battle, not babysit count downs. While Total War had enough of a pedigree to realise their mistake (while of course denying they made one) and quietly removed virtually all of the button mashing from the game,
Tl;dr - Its a skirmish game stuck in micro-hell. There's no room for strategy, you'll be too busy performing handbreak turns and spamming CD's to actually notice much less direct the battle. You react to this game, you don't take an active hand in it.
If you're looking for a new MOBA this could be entertaining if you can find big enough team games to actually cobble together a half-respectable fleet on both sides. There is doubtless a lot to appeal to the MOBA fan here - cooldown management is essential, combat is a second-by-second affair about managing a power bar.
If however you were hoping for the epic game of naval strategy they promised...this is not it. What's so frustrating is that it easily could have been. Why they decided to go this route with it is something i'll never understand but I don't plan to waste any more time trying to find out.… Expand
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