Looking down on the carrier with a zoomed-out camera leaves out all the information I need to make decisions, so my carrier experience was spent almost entirely inside the tactical map screen. Playing a carrier feels like a slow-moving RTS has been welded onto the side of a different game, and I don’t think the native view works very well.

Carriers are commanded from an overhead view as the flight deck manager, ordering flights of torpedo boats to attack enemy battleships or sending fighters to intercept enemy bombers. The most unique is the aircraft carrier, which carries no ship-to-ship guns at all. Some are slower, more powerful, or pack smoke screens and deadly torpedo spreads. Each of Warships’ four ship types (destroyer, cruiser, carrier, and battleship) drive differently. There’s a huge variety of gadgets and weapons to play with, from scout planes to emergency repair crews. On my GTX 970, I had no problem getting a solid 60 frames per second on the highest quality settings. “Sky and Clouds Quality” and “Sea Rendering Quality” would sound like esoteric settings for minutia in any other game, but in Warships half of what the game renders is water or sky. It includes support for multiple monitors and a variety of native resolutions. Even as pretty as it is, it comes packed with graphics options that should tone down enough for less powerful rigs to run it. I’ve mentioned it in passing already, but Warships looks incredibly good. And because boats can't pivot instantaneously, it takes pleasant intuition to pull off. Instead of doing a barrel roll or hiding behind a bombed-out church, this mental geometry is how captains stay safe on the oceans. There’s a sweet spot at around 30 degrees that brings all guns onto a target while minimizing exposure. Unfortunately, going broadside also shows the enemy team a huge target to shoot at. (I’ve tried to subdue that part of my brain with booze, but alas, it remains.) With guns mounted all down the body of a ship, facing broadside to an enemy is the best way to unload on some poor sucker. There’s an art to angles in Warships, and it tickles the tiny, forgotten part of my brain that experiences math as a form of pleasure.

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