Sea Power is a game I've waited anxiously for since 2022. The original screenshots made it look fantastic, but I got sadder and sadder as no news had come from it in a while. One day, whilst scrolling through YouTube mindlessly while I was at work, I saw a video pop up for Sea Power and honestly I had to do a double take because I thought it was another Cold Waters video. I've been hooked on watching Stealth17's and Wolfpack345's videos on Sea Power, and I was truly salivating for the experience to try it for myself, confident that all critical bugs shown in gameplay videos would be ironed out before release.

Unfortunately, launch day came, and that was not the case.

Personally (and to keep this review brief), the only bugs I've experienced (so far, at least) are my fleet in the Strait of Hormuz Tarawa mission just deciding they wanted to become submarines (no damage, no flooding), and a Harrier just freezing in mid-air, essentially soft-locking me from completing the mission. The other bugs I've experienced is aircraft not being able to land on the carrier (this was close to being done with the Breakthrough scenario with the Orel-Class carrier) and continuously just performing a holding pattern above the ship like flies over a corpse, and the Slava-Class cruiser from that same scenario didn't feel like using any of its SA-N-6 (SA-10 'Grumble' for you DCS nerds like me) missiles against the flights of RA-5C recon jets, and also decided it was 4:59pm on a Friday and it was clocking out and going back home to Russia, ignoring any and all orders to return to the fleet formation... which is a tool that also doesn't work very well at all, in its current state.

These are just a handful of the bugs I've experienced with Sea Power so far, and other people out there have experienced far more severe and game-crashing bugs.

But, why do I have the game listed as recommended if it seems in such a shoddy state? Well for one, unlike a company like Bethesda, the community pretty much can't fix this one with unofficial patches and we have to wait for the devs at Triassic Games, who are certainly putting in the work (at least from what I've seen) to collect all forms of data and try to implement fixes as fast as they can (it still begs as to why none of this was really play tested before launch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and at least trying to smooth out this bumpy and long road. On top of this, we've seen the proof of concept, we as the community KNOW what Sea Power can be and hopefully sometime soon WILL be. It's Cold Waters' Dot Mod on steroids, I mean the game itself uses a lot of the devs from Dot Mod, that's why there's been no major updates for Dot Mod in well over a year. It has all the markings of a game that can be really great if the devs keep at it, especially with workshop support which has already made some great mods with the game just being a few days old, with custom scenarios, changing radar detection ranges of weapons and ships to be more realistic, renaming Russian equipment with their GRAU designations, etc. The other thing the game offers is incredible modability. For example, I didn't like the fact that the AV-8A Harriers were carrying AIM-9L's, which felt too modern for them; so, as easy as that, I went and found the AV-8A's .ini file in the game's files, edited the string of text to be from AIM-9L (aim-9l in the actual .ini file) to be AIM-9D, as there is no AIM-9G in the game as of now, and when I booted up a quick scenario to see if it worked, the AIM-9D was in the 9L's place with no fuss, and it was a seamless easy modding that took me, a total dummy, less than 30 seconds to do. Wanna make the USS Kitty Hawk fire AIM-54 Phoenixes? You can probably do that. You want the Orel-Class carrier to carry SA-N-6 SAM's rather than P-700 Granit anti-ship/cruise missiles? Yeah, that's probably doable, too.

TL;DR: Sea Power is in Bethesda-levels of 'game-breaking bugs and CtD' hell currently, but the modability, proof of concept, dedication from the devs, and modern-day Steam Workshop access promises a Naval fleet management game that's bound to give endless hours of fun when everything is ironed out.