PT Boats: Knights of the Sea Can’t Keep Afloat

Akella, a Russian based developer, are the creators of PT Boats: Knights of the Sea. Akella was also the developer of Pirates of the Caribbean. This time, Akella has fast forwarded themselves into the 20th century, focusing on World War II. Throughout the game, you will be fighting on the side of the Allies and Axis, however, as the title suggests, it puts a spin on the World War II genre and focuses on ship battles exclusively. Knights of the Sea is made with the idea of giving you the feeling that you are an admiral controlling small torpedo boats and massive battleships while pitting them in battle against other naval ships for nautical victory. Unfortunately, PT Boats: Knights of the Sea feels like an unfinished game at best.

One of the main reasons that Knights of the Sea feels like an unfinished game is simply because there is absolutely nothing to see in the entire game. The only environment you will see is an endless horizon of water and sky. There is almost no land except for the tiny island at the beginning of the tutorial and the icebergs in the multiplayer maps. We have to understand though that the ocean is a vast space of nothing but water but it is this fact that makes for a boring environment.

Akella tries to make this environment more interesting by adding waves and letting you look under the water. However, the waves cause screen jittering, which does not cause any in-game problems, but is just odd to look at. As for the underwater cameras, the most interesting thing to look at is the torpedoes that you fire. Still, anything you see under the water, except torpedoes, is a nothing but a blob of grey with no refinement. In accommodation with the water and sky there are only going to be a handful of ships to fight on a given mission.

Unlike the environments, the ships have some life to them. All of the ships that you will command and destroy will look like a virtual version of the models that you might have put together as a child. Although these ships are finely detailed, there is not enough variety and you will begin to feel that each boat looks similar to the last. As for the crew, each sailor has a position on the ship and looks like they are doing something important while you are in fights, such as operating and reloading the guns. However, the crews of these boats look like robotic clones whenever there are no battles taking place and this happens often. Sadly, the lack of variety in graphics carries over to poor gameplay.

Knights of the Sea starts off in the right direction. You are in control of a PT boat in which you can jump to each of the gunners and torpedo positions. However, this novelty wears off quickly and after you set off into an endless sea of blue and you begin to slowly realize that this is what most of the game will be like from now on. This is mainly because the maps are huge while the giant ships move slowly. If the ability to fast forward time was not implemented into the game you could spend easily 90% of the game sailing instead of fighting. There is a variety of Axis and Allies boats that you will encounter such as cruisers, destroyers, transports, submarines and minesweepers. When you do get into sea battles it feels exciting because there is finally something to do. As you progress through the campaign and get into bigger battles with more ships, you will be constantly bringing up the tactical map to give orders to the other ships in your fleet because the game will not let you enter the gunning position on anything bigger than a PT boat. This just screams missed opportunity here because I would have loved to control the guns of a big cruiser or destroyer. At this point it loses its FPS novelty and becomes a light RTS where you select your ships and you click on the ships you want to destroy.

As far as the story is concerned, there is none. Before each mission there is a tiny description of what you are about to do. While in game, there are terrible voice actors telling me what to do and that there is someone out there somewhere watching your actions, as well, grading you based on how successful you are in eliminating the enemy boats. However, to some people, story is not everything right? So how about multiplayer? Well, do not hold your breath because the servers are as bare as a majority of the single player maps. Although, I think the multiplayer could have been the best part of this game. As for the multiplayer maps, Akella added islands and icebergs in 4 of their 5 multiplayer maps with different weather effects to choose from. It is too bad that I will not be able to experience the multiplayer aspect of this game before this review hits the website.

To put it briefly, PT Boats: Knights of the Sea is a boring game with nothing new to add to this scarcely explored genre. In addition, the lack of variety in gameplay and environments gives this game its dull feeling. The only positives are that the boats look fairly well put together and the torpedo camera gimmick never wore off. However, this genre has been done better before. Battlestations: Midway and Pacific are definitely more deserving of your money than Knights of the Sea. The fact that Knights of the Sea had no story at all, and even worse, annoying voice actors with bad accents dragged the experience down even further. Stay away from this game.