Naval War Arctic Circle is hard, at times, it’s really hard. In fact, you’ll end up playing some missions several times because of this. That’s really due to a flaw in the mission design, if you ask me, which usually drops you into the middle of a mission with a low percentage chance to succeed, unless you follow a pretty narrow range of actions. What are those required actions? Well, that’ the trick you see.

So you end up doing a lot of trial and error in Naval War Arctic Circle which is sad because it takes some of the fun out of the game. It also means that many people will play each level in exactly the same way, which takes some creativity and realism out of the game.

For example, you’ll lose a mission because three hours of game time have passed, or because you lost a small handful of units. That doesn’t really feel like naval warfare at all if you ask me. A lot of naval warfare is stealth when dealing with submarines, trying to find them before they find you and Naval War Arctic Circle feels like you’re rushing around trying to do far too many things in too little a span of time.

Aside from the irritating requirement of trial and error to pass missions, the game is quite interesting. The interface and graphics are such that you feel like you are sitting in the mission command center giving orders instead of on any of the ships. Since you’re in the position of an admiral this feels about right.

The other daring thing they’ve done is given direct control over submarines. I touched on this when I saw the game in Sweden back in January. For the type of naval war that this game revolves around, it works. Mostly because these submarines aren’t involved in long-term, long-range covert missions or as nuclear deterrents which was a major part of sub warfare during the Cold War. They are like queens in a game of Chess, sometimes you need to hold them back and use them strategically and that could only be done with direct control over them. So while sub and naval warfare diehards and purists might complain about this, for the gameplay it works quite well.