This is one of the newest of the seemingly endless Games Workshop licensed products.
I was kind of excited for this game because the old Man O’ War tabletop game was one of my all-time favorite miniatures games. The original boxed set was a spectacular piece of game design (the follow-on games were not as good), and it’s influenced a large number of modern games: for instance the super-popular X-Wing miniatures game that takes up a good wall and a half in most hobby shops nowadays owes most if its mechanics to Man O’ War.
So if you’re like me, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is that this game is NOT a digitized version of the tabletop game.
The good news is that it retains a crunchy core of that game and then kinda hot-glues that core onto something very much like Sid Meier’s Pirates. And if you’re like me, you enjoyed the hell out of Pirates.
The game opens with you in command of a small ship with some crew. You can upgrade the boat or buy a new one with more/fewer guns, more/less cargo area, larger/smaller crew complement, etc. You and your crew all gain experience as you fight.
You can sail from port-to-port running fetch-and-carry quests, and theoretically you can make your fortune by figuring out where to buy cargo low and sell high… though in reality you make so much more money by running quests and hunting down bounties that the speculation stuff is never worth your while.
The in-port buying of weapons, hiring crew, getting missions and upgrading your ship is all done in third-person view with your captain running around a small 3-D area… which is sort of silly. The town graphics are rudimentary… like EQ1-level rudimentary… they are more a nuisance than a help and I think I would have preferred a table-driven UI there instead. Indeed, that’s eventually what you end up dealing with after you run your little person over to the appropriate table or door or whatever.
The 3-D town interface is there because when you’re in battle you can take control over one or a number of your crew (mostly the captain, but also a battle-wizard, a sharpshooter and others), and sometimes you get attacked in town so you have to run a battle there too. Again, I think they could have shaved this part out of the game with little fear.
The ship-to-ship (or ship-to-monster) combat is pretty good. The graphics for the water are pretty good and the ships are fairly well-rendered… at least compared to the laughable town models. At its core it’s very similar to the ballistic targeting type of play that you’ve seen in other games like Pirates(!), World of Warships, and even Rebel Galaxy. You wait for your cannons to reload, adjust the elevation of the guns to match the range, lead the target appropriately and fire. MoW:C seems to add the innovation of heavy seas to the mix: the waves cause your ship to rock and heave, so if you’re fighting in a storm your accuracy can be affected. For me, this is where the game shines – you can target the sails or different areas of the hull if you’re good (or close enough), and the ramming/boarding mechanics seem solid.
Boarding actions and the aforementioned town fights are all fought in a 3rd-person over-the-shoulder view that is kind of reminiscent of Mount & Blade, but not as complex or as fun. The animations and controls are not as responsive as I’d like. I appreciate what they were going for, but… meh.
They get the Warhammer Old World down pretty well. You’ll fight Ork and Chaos and Kislevite and Empire and Brettonian ships, and they all have their own interesting little twists. The various port towns have some semi-unique quests and hirelings that seem to be varied by nation much in the way that the Spanish or Dutch ports would be different in Pirates. I haven’t run into Skaven, Elves (of any hue), or Dwarves yet.
Some of the quests are pretty interesting. An early quest asks you to transport a quantity of refugees fleeing an undead infestation… and about midway through your journey you find that they’ve all turned into zombies and you have to fight them off in the 3rd-person combat thing. Another quest with a (possibly cursed) hammer has a number of twists and turns.
I’m only a handful of hours in, but it’s fairly diverting for a $30 game. Not as polished as Rebel Galaxy, but it scratches many of the same itches.