Wednesday 14 November 2012

Naval Simulation Game: Enigma Rising Tide

Enigma Rising Tide The next game I want talk about is a game, that has been released back in August 2003 and was developed by Tesseraction. The game is called Enigma: Rising Tide. It’s a naval simulation game, where you get to control a destroyer, a sub, a corvette or a PT-boat. You can man all the stations on the vessels, from the AA-guns to the deck guns. Enigma: Rising Tide looks like it’s set in World War II, but actually the game is following an alternative storyline. World War I has been won by Imperial Germany. France and Great Britain have been occupied by Germany. The United States never intervened, because in this storyline the Germans never sunk the Lusitania. The remainder of the British Fleet sails to Hong Kong, together with its Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
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There are three major factions. First off, you have the United States. They never entered World War I, this is why their navy is so strong in the game, at least if you compare them to the British fleet. The US fleet has some carriers and a lot of destroyers. Fun fact is that the US, isn’t led by Roosevelt, but instead it’s being led by Truman. The small cut scenes, will make clear what’s happening in the world around you.

The second faction is the Imperial German fleet, with Kaiser Wilhelm at its command. Their fleet mainly consists out of submarines, with battleships under construction (available in the Gold Edition).

Last, but not least, you have the League of Nations, with two important members namely the Japanese Imperial fleet and the Royal British fleet in exile. The British fleet suffered some losses, mainly because of her defeat in World War I. The main goal of the British fleet, is to reconquer the British islands, at all costs.

Enigma: Rising Tide, doesn’t have a tutorial. So in the beginning, it’s all about getting used to the commands, once you’ve mastered those you’ll be ready to send the enemy to the bottom of the sea. The shooting mechanism in the game isn’t too advanced, ultimately it’s really a game of hit and miss. If you’re not satisfied with AI’s shooting accuracy, you can always jump in and do it yourself. There are also a lot of submarines in the game, which are rather difficult to sink when they are submerged.

Little tutorial: You need to react fast when you see a submarine heading towards you. You first have to dodge the torpedoes, once the submarine has launched all of its torpedoes, you need to set up an attack run. When you’re right on top of the submarine, and you see it on your radar then it’s time to launch the depth charges and hope it hits the submarine underneath.

Conclusion, Enigma: Rising Tide was quite innovating when released, back in 2003. It had quite some bugs (planes crashing into each other), but I think they were resolved by the later patch releases. Enigma: Rising Tide doesn’t follow the historical storyline, but this doesn’t prevent you from having a great time playing this game. This naval simulation game does have some great potential, too bad they haven’t created a recent sequel. Maybe in the future...

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