Same here. Killerfish’s titles have all been solid at launch, but this launch sounds a bit of a mess.
Are you talking about the Steam Reviews or are the others out there.
I waited for a Steam summer sale to pick up Atlantic fleet. You are right the Steam reviews seem to be from fans of the company and genre, who are really struggling with the UI, and there is no AI.
I may have to wait until 2022 for this game.
Seems like the Steam reviews are about UI. But I’ve only read a few.
According to this discussion,
Killerfish had a split last year, so perhaps they lost some key talent… who are now working on this (in the reborn Microprose stable):
Edit: Found a bit more relating to the story:
I co-founded Killerfish Games back in 2013-14 with Paul Sincock, and due to creative differences he did not desire continuing on with the team that built Atlantic Fleet and Cold Waters. I secured the rights to use our assets from the Killerfish backlog in early 2019, which is when we seriously started developing Sea Power, and he must have started WotS a few months after that.
If you go to the KFG site about section today, it no longer mentions me as co-founder, but this archived snapshot from before the WotS launch does does[web.archive.org].
As for Triassic, originally we had picked a different studio name, but there was another company blocking us, so we changed to Triassic instead. Why Triassic? Because dinosaurs are awesome!
/Nils, CEO @ Triassic Games
Yea, Sea Power looks f*ing amazing.
I’d wondered if some of the best key members of killerfish going to Microprose was going to hurt the quality of Killerfish games. Looks like the answer was “yes”.
Game plays fine imo. Yes there’s some jank, but it nails the distant guns in the haze moment.
Good. What about the complaints about ships not doing anything without explicit commands?
I looked through the Steam reviews and I guess I understand some of the pain - I wasn’t looking at this game being about air power, but it does seem like it’s too fiddly.
True. They are on hold fire when born. But its not like you have to micro every gun. Its pretty easy to tell the entire fleet to target that and let fly with everything which looks ridiculously awesome from a distance.
Can you target a whole group, or just individual ships?
Individual things I think, there’s a button for target closest enemy (Y) and one for ‘fuck it up, boys!’(V). So you only need two buttons really if you want to have the bare minimum of interaction.
I bought this in the Steam sale, played through the tutorials etc. I thought I’d do some scenarios before diving into the campaign, but frankly I’m baffled. I’ve played through the first two and, so far, they seem ridiculously one-sided.
Sunda Strait has you attacking a huge fleet with just two cruisers. I can put up a fight but there are torpedoes everywhere, and conditions are so bad it’s difficult to hit anything. There’s room for me to improve my performance I’m sure, but it does seem like the odds are stacked against me.
The second, Coral Sea (day one) is even more ridiculous. 16 wildcats attacking a destroyer and an oiler. Apparently, as the allies you have to just survive? Well, how?! The wildcats just bombed the shit out of me straight away, just as I expected. The oiler sunk in seconds. I even tried playing as the Japanese thinking maybe my inexperience was the reason, but sure enough, you can just select all aircraft and click “attack”, and the battle is as good as won. I think I sank both ships with the loss of two aircraft.
Am I missing something here? What’s the point of these scenarios?
I decided to wait until the game had been patched then forgot how to play it. But I think the scenarios are a little rough - the battles start immediately with almost zero time to acclimate.
I’m wondering if the campaigns are any better, but the airplane micromanagement turned me off. I’m hoping for a better future for this game but I’m not expecting it.