Rock, Paper, Shotgun

War-gaming supremos Battlefront have released some footage of Akella’s naval simulator, PT Boats: Knights Of The Sea, and I’ve post it below for your inspection. The game is supposedly a strategy-action hybrid in which you can control warboats from German, Russian and Allied forces in World War II at both strategic and tactical levels. It certain looks intriguing. We first spotted this on the horizon early this year, and release is supposedly imminent, but there’s no firm date. Anyway, go take a look at boats firing their large weapons, below.
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Turn-based strategy RPG (think King’s Bounty without the Warcraftian cartoonishness) Disciples III: Renaissance has the a splendid website. You even “turn” the pages of an ancient book to read about the game features. In fact, the entire game’s art-direction is exquisite, apart from the hex-based battle maps, which seem peculiarly deserted. Impossibly gothic cathedral cities, endlessly knotted and gnarled forests, warped supernatural creatures aplenty: it’s got the dark fantasy thing down. And the game looks suitably epic from a player’s point of view too, demanding a RPGTBS mentality for long-term fantasy adventuring. A developer walkthrough from GamesCom explains some of the game mechanics below, but I’d go take a look at their site (English switch top right) to leaf through some more of the game assets, it really does go overboard.
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Sadly nothing to do with the classic Captain Blood, and everything to do with classic novel Captain Blood. It’s a hack ‘n’ slash adventure game from the developers of Sea Dogs, complete with pirates getting stabbed, cannons getting primed, and bosses getting – wuh-oh – quicktime event’d. I played this a bit in Moscow last year and it was actually pretty fun – especially the arcade boat violence between speedy galleons – but I’m not exactly holding out for a masterpiece. Go take a look at the dev walkthroughs below, and you can judge for yourself.

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Is it me, or is sail-boat violence suddenly vogue for PC games? Akella’s RPG-with-water Age of Pirates II has the whole show: tall ships with long cannons, men in frilly shirts, cutlass action and buried treasure. While I’m more of a ninja man than a pirate man (really a robot guy, truth be told) I can really see the appeal in what Akella are doing: a wide-open RPG complete with four campaigns, a multitude of quests, and all the usual Caribbean haunts. While I can’t exactly see this game hitting Bioware-level high notes of RPG design (Akella’s back catalogue does not exactly sparkle, meaning there’s a high potential for trash) this is nevertheless a game worth keeping an eye on. Trailer and feature list after the jump.

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