All Guns On Deck

I want to be straight with you before anything else: this game has been sitting in Early Access since August 2015, and the last developer update was over eight years ago. That is not a footnote, it is the entire context for everything that follows. Steam's own store page flags the development silence, and community threads openly ask players to report it. Whatever potential existed here, the roadmap to "six continents" of content never arrived. With that caveat firmly on the table, what actually shipped is a side-scrolling naval arcade-tactics game with a genuinely interesting core loop. You command a warship against airborne enemies, with the twist that your opponents fight entirely from the air, raining bombs and ejecting pilots onto your deck. Victory is split between two simultaneous demands: manually aiming up to five guns using a mouse-driven reticle that requires you to lead your shots (projectile travel time is real and punishing), and dragging crew members between six belowdecks rooms dedicated to gunning, hull repair, firefighting, engineering, and special abilities. Let one side of that equation slip and your ship sinks fast. The multitasking pressure is the game's best quality, and it produces genuine tension in a way that neither pure RTS nor pure arcade shooters manage alone. The Construction Yard at your home port lets you configure ship loadouts and slot in upgrade chips before each sortie. The Barracks handles crew hiring, and the Chip Store provides consumables and weapon upgrades. On paper that is a functional RPG progression loop. In practice, the port navigation itself feels sluggish, walking between buildings in a side-scrolling base area that reviewers consistently called a chore and suggested should have been a simple menu. The AI gunners assigned to man your weapons automatically are also a significant liability: they target enemy positions rather than leading shots, making manual control not just preferable but essentially mandatory if you want to survive. That is a hard ask on later waves where crew rotation and gun control compete for your attention every few seconds. The tutorial is sparse to the point of being unhelpful. Early reviews from multiple outlets noted that finishing the tutorial still left players unsure what to do next, and the game offers little in-battle guidance. For a strategy-sim hybrid that wants to layer RPG progression on top of real-time tactics, that is a structural problem, not just a polish issue. The raw difficulty combined with weak onboarding drove away casual players early. Veterans who pushed through found something with legitimate depth: fleet expansion toward cruisers and aircraft carriers, sea monster encounters that change combat dynamics, and a satisfying gear loop once the systems click. From my position as someone who tracks the lifecycle of strategy games carefully, the pattern here is unfortunately familiar. The core mechanics were promising enough to generate genuine early enthusiasm. The community gave it a chance. The developer went quiet. The gap between what was sold and what was delivered is substantial, and no amount of discounting closes it when the game has not been patched in years, the Early Access label still sits on the store page, and over 80 percent of the Steam reviews left are negative. If you want naval tactics with crew management done properly and actually finished, look elsewhere.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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