Naval Ops: Warship Gunner

by KOEI Corp

Product Features

• 40 Deadly Missions
• Over 800 ship components
• A real action shooter
• Additional modes and features

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00009B05Y
• Item Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: June 24, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,070 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #50 in Video Games > PlayStation 2 > Strategy

Product Description

Realize your vision of a state-of-the-art war machine. Build a ship, sail into the heart of enemy waters, and put it to the test. You won't just prove your ship in battle...you'll prove yourself, too.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun, arcade/sim mix..., July 12, 2003

By 

"dsingh2000" (Wichita, KS USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naval Ops: Warship Gunner (Video Game)

This game is very interesting. While most naval warfare fans will like many aspects of it, they may not like the futuristic feel of the storyline. But, rest assured, there is a WWII mode that locks one into WWII technologies. The graphics are excellent, and very smooth. There are 4 countries warships to choose from, U.S, U.K., Japan and Germany. These are all very accurately detailed, and you can modify them to your liking. You can even take a basic hull, and create your own design. Best of all, your creation is accurately modelled in the 3D battle sequences!!! While the controls take a bit of getting used to, they allow for a lot of "control" over your warship. The action gets intense, and you have to time your shots with lead time and arc them in. Once you get the hang of it: tremendous fun. You face near impossible odds, and fall back on your intellect to come up with a bigger better design. Detail is meticulous here, research well done in many areas, lacking in a few. This is a great game over all, with good sound effects and tracks. It has good replay value, and is very addictive do to the fact of building new and better ships. Koei has blended strategy and arcade action beautifully in this title. As Dynasty warriors is to the Romance of the 3 Kingdoms series, Naval Ops is to the PTO series.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Design construction addiction, February 6, 2004

By 

nita j slabaugh (lawton, ok United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naval Ops: Warship Gunner (Video Game)

After playing this game almost non-stop, I have deduced that you must give your spouse at least a little of your time.Warship Gunner is by far the most addictive game that I have ever played. In the beginning you will start off with a measley sub-class destroyer and by games end, control a dual hulled battle ship with god like fire power.The best part is of course the construction of each ship that YOU build, painstaking design is required. The knowledge of fluid dynamics is practically taught to you as you build your warship. With 40 missions this game will keep you going, but wait after the final credits have rolled save the game and explore massive new weapon systems that were previously unavailable to you. NOWG, is a "buy me" now, not only for a shooting game, but for the advanced ship buildingarchitectual designer in all of us.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Like DOOM on the high seas., December 11, 2005

By 

BasinBictory "Mister Basin to You" (Nowhere in particular) - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Naval Ops: Warship Gunner (Video Game)

This game is most certainly NOT a faithfully rendered warship simulation, nor is it a highly detailed strategy-fest requiring quick thinking and planning. In all actuality, it's a third person (or rather, third-ship) shooter that manages to be a heck of a lot of fun, despite the quirky menu screens that take a little time to get used to.

One of the main features that this title is proud of is the ability to custom-build your own warship. At the beginning of the game, you have precious few resources with which to do this, but as the game progresses, and you gain access to more and better materials, technologies, weapons and the like, you can build a ship of unbelieveable combat capability. In this sense, it is a lot like the generation of first person shooters where you gain powerups which usually translated into more firepower and/or better armor protection. Same thing here. Except that instead of an individual infantry soldier, you are a WW2-era warship.

At the beginning of the game, you are captain of a destroyer, a small, fast, but lightly armed ship, and are tasked with various missions where you either destroy enemy ships, escort an allied ship while destroying enemy ships, pound an enemy coast while destroying enemy ships, or pick up secret agents while destroying enemy ships. You get the picture. As the game progresses, you can buy or design more powerful ship designs, such as cruisers, battleships, aircraft carriers, and even "battlecarriers" which are a sort of battleship/carrier hybrid. (and not very good at either role, in my experience)

Most of the fighting is ship-to-ship combat, and in the later levels, you face whole fleets of massive warships. Also, there are boss levels (see the departure from anything realistic?) where you fight one-on-one against an enemy "supership" which is usually some anime-inspired fantasy engineering marvel that not only is heavier than three aircraft carriers combined, but can sail at airplane-like speeds! The combat interface, while nicely having the aspect of having to carefully adjust your guns for windage to put shells on target, is pretty darn unrealistic. But that is what makes it so fun. The actual practice of naval gunnery, circa WW2, was a time-consuming and difficult affair which, if accurately modeled in a simulation game, would suck all the fun right out of it.

While the early missions seem simple enough, the fact that your only available ships are small and lightly armed make them rather challenging. In the later levels, even though you face legions of enemy ships, your firepower is often so great that only a few well-placed volleys from your main guns can sink an entire flotilla of enemies, which makes the later levels somewhat less challenging.

One more bone to pick is that this game really doesn't do the aircraft carrier justice. WW2-era aircraft carriers carried upwards of 100 airplanes, and with their range and ability to deliver heavy munitions on enemy ships with relative precision, they quickly made the big-gun battleships obsolete. Not so in this game. Carriers only carry a dozen or so planes (about an eighth or tenth of what occurred in real life) and so their striking power is greatly reduced. Furthermore, this game emphasizes visual-range combat, so the range advantage of airplanes is virtually nullified compared with real life. The real queens of the high seas in this game are the battleships, who, with their heavy guns (as large as the legendary 18-inch guns mounted on the Yamato-class battleships) are capable of sinking even capital ships with a volley or three. By the time you're able to purchase a battleship, you will be more or less invincible against anything the AI can throw at you. There is no real tactics involved, just what amounts to bumper boats with 45,000-ton warships, meanwhile shooting at your enemies and getting shot at.

If you are looking for a true-life WW2 warship simulator, you'll be sorely disappointed. If you're looking for a fun, engaging game loosely based on WW2 naval combat, this is the ticket.