Military battles offer rich possibilities for computer gaming, combining the shock and awe of lethal destructive force with the no-consequences scenario of starting over whenever you make a mistake. Normal war does not allow for trial and error, but most gamers have gotten very good at determining tactics this way. Naval Ops Commander puts you in charge of a naval battle group and sends you into a series of combat missions with varied objectives where you will use trial and error to find the right way to win the war.

This is really two games in one. The first is the strategic building aspect, where you invest your hard-earned battle winnings into technical research and components to build your fleet. This interface is a lot of fun for ship fans, with four different navy approaches based on the Japanese, British, American, and German navies circa WWII. As your tech levels increase, new weapons, engines, electronics, and materials become available, allowing you to build progressively more advanced and powerful vessels. The sheer number of options here is the real star. I am not sure they ever actually built this many varieties of weapons in real-life, with every possible caliber eventually available for each type of gun. In the higher tech levels, you even develop optical weapons such as lasers, etc.

In order to provide balance and limits to the game, the hull you base your ship on is rated at a certain tonnage. As you add boilers, turbines, deck armor, and armaments, the additional weight begins to slow your vessel's top speed and affect its ability to maneuver. However, I usually had the most success by loading up as much weaponry and armor as the hull could take and trusting in my firepower and escorts to win the day. A lot depends on the type of mission you are taking on as well. More weapons and armor will not likely help you chase down fleet submarines as they pound the transport ships you are supposed to be escorting. You need to be able to run them down and depth charge them to Davy Jones' locker.

That brings us to the battle phase of the game, where you and three of your escort ships will take on an assortment of evil empire ships and shore emplacements. During the missions where you have to take out shore emplacements like fuel tanks, runways, and skyscrapers, you can't help but wonder what we would do if that ever happened for real in one of our port cities like New York or Boston. The bulk of the missions have you tackling waves of planes, ships, submarines, mines, and shore-based cannons. It is here that the game both shines and becomes fairly unrealistic. Despite all of the attention to detail paid to your loadout in the ship-building phase, during the battle phase your ship is practically a superstar. What are the chances of a destroyer with three destroyer escort ships taking on a battleship, 3 cruisers, 6 destroyers, a carrier, and a host of PT boats, all in the same mission? Once you get beyond the sheer lunacy of the numbers facing your small fleet, the battles are indeed a lot of fun.

You operate from a 3D perspective, basically isometric, with limited camera controls to zoom in and out, and the ability to move the view around within the sensor range of your fleet. The graphics are quite sharp for a PS2 game, with nary a frame rate glitch or slowdown to worry about. When your ships take damage, they begin to smoke and then burst into flames that can really put out quite a smoke cloud. The attention to details here is very good. The sounds of battle are quite good as well. Guns crack, machine guns crackle, rockets whoosh out of their casings, planes zoom by on bombing runs. The voiceovers lead one to believe that a little girl who is awed by the battle is your communications officer, reading you dispatches with hushed excitement and amazement.

Three areas of battle, originally named A, B, and C, each contain 10 levels of progressively more difficult combat. Your missions include seek and destroy, shore bombardment, escort duty for convoys and battleships, and even base defense. The level system works, because every gamer is familiar with the way it is structured. Since money is so important for ramping up your tech levels quickly, it behooves the player to replay the earlier levels over a few times until you get an A grade. This gives you additional money in the bank, as well as when you get an A, additional bonus components are unlocked for use on your ships.

Naval Ops Commander takes an intriguing and fun cut at naval battles, giving games a title that should be fun for adult gamers, but probably doesn't have enough action to suit the younger generation of game fans that want their action fast and furious. If you dream of Midway and Iwo Jima, then Naval Ops may be just the thing to play once the kids go to bed for the night.