Preview: S.C.S. Dangerous Waters

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As you can see, DW is loaded with detail. One can navigate and give orders from both the station screens and the overall navigation screen. In the Nav screen, you can see the known contacts, marked with Naval Tactical Data System symbols. You have total control of your platform, but here’s the catch: you are literally the captain of your own ship. And that’s all. You have no control over allied ships. The best you can do is select a contact and click “promote to link” in the stations panels. Then the allied AI ship will go after the contact, because you’ve transmitted link data to him. But you’ve no control over how the AI does his job, like you had in Fleet Command. There is a reason for that.

DW is really designed for multiplay. Yes, players. Multiplay. If you’ve ever wanted to have those modern-day sub-vs-sub-vs-ship-vs-plane duels, here it is in grand glory. Because according to Jamie Carlson, DW’s biggest fun will be the ability to collaborate in multiplayer with other units to identify and attack the enemy team, without fragging your own teammates. If you’ve ever really wanted to play underwater chess, here’s your chance. Same goes for you surface-warfare nuts. Here’s your chance to see if you really can got get a modern day sub from the surface and live. Are your helicopters and sonars equal to the deadly sub?

I had a lot of fun playing with Dangerous Waters. I’m a naval-sim neophyte. Though I had 688(I) and have seen Sub Command in action, I’m at heart an Airedale and prefer to fly fixed-wing fast movers, so I’m not as good at games like DW as many of you are. But I loved Fleet Command and I can tell you that if you liked the previous offerings from Sonalysts, you’ll love this one. It retains the mission editors and campaigns you’re fond of, and the editors offer endless flexibility to create games for single player and multiplayer, from one mission to a full-blown online, “gut-bustin’, mother-lovin’ NAVY war,” as Kirk Douglas said in that great war movie, In Harm’s Way. The sea is your oyster in DW and if this is where your heart is you will not be disappointed. Anchors aweigh!

S.C.S. Dangerous Waters will be available exclusively through Battlefront.com.

Download a pdf of this article here (753 kb).

System Specs

• AMD Athlon 3000+ processor
  
  
• MachSpeed N2PAP-Lite motherboard with onboard Aureal AC97 sound
  
  
• PNY Technologies Verto GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
  
  
• 1GB Kingston PC2700 DDR DRAM
  
  
• Creative 12x CD-ROM
  
  
• Maxtor 40GB main drive
  
  
• DirectX Version 9.0a
  
  
• Windows 2000 with SP4
  

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