The Best Strategy Game of 2024 Officially Has a Campaign

I love a good strategy game, and like anyone who spent a bit too much time reading Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, I especially love the drama of naval combat with missiles, nuclear submarines, and intrigue.

Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age entered early access in November 2024, and though it was fairly impressive from the get-go, Triassic Games' debut title was sorely lacking a proper persistent campaign.

This all changed with the festive 4th of July update, version 0.8.0, which added a host of changes on top of the so-called Task Force Mode. Sea Power is still decidedly an early access title, but one that is perfectly capable of besting most large-scale strategy games today.

Sea Power's Pacific Holiday

The first official linear campaign for Sea Power and its new Task Force Mode is Pacific Strike '85, which puts you in charge of a NATO group in the Western Pacific.

As the name implies, Task Force Mode finally gives budding naval commanders the ability to customize their fleet, in a deck-building process that will feel intimately familiar to WARNO and Broken Arrow veterans.

Campaign missions unlock linearly, but the state of your ships and associated units carries over between them, giving you that all-important sense of continuity. Interestingly, that includes more granular features like weapons expenditure, so using up all your anti-aircraft missiles might save you today, but will leave you exposed tomorrow.

Beyond the campaign mode, update 0.8.0 also adds major changes that affect just about all weapons in the game. The most relevant of them is easily the sonar rework, explained in an earlier dev blog here. Detection ranges vary a lot more now depending on environmental and technological features of the ships involved, making for more dynamic engagements.

The AI is also more capable now, with better torpedo handling and the added ability to use jammers against the player in both defensive and offensive capacities, depending on the engagement mode. To make this a little easier on you, Triassic Games added a minimap option to better visualize radar performance under jamming.

As for AI units, Sea Power 0.8.0 fleshes out the Australian and French components, both in support for the Pacific Strike '85 campaign and an upcoming Falklands War scenario. Among the new units are the F-111C strike-fighter and variants of the legendary Mirage III, used by dozens of nations during the Cold War.

One of my favorite things in the changelog is the addition of binocular and periscope views, which cranks the immersion up beyond belief. Pressing Z while in a unit brings out the binoculars (or periscope for submarines). Depending on the systems available, like zoom levels of night vision, LShift+Z toggles between modes.

Alone in the Open Strategy Ocean

Despite the immense popularity of modern naval strategy at the dawn of computer gaming, it looks like we have puzzlingly been left with Sea Power and Sea Power alone for the time being.

Cold Waters by Killerfish Games made quite the splash in 2017, and Matrix Games got the usual strong response for its full-spectrum Command: Modern Operations in 2019, but neither of them has quite the production value that used to be customary in the genre.

I remember growing up with naval combat games being defined by classics like Red Storm Rising and 688 Attack Sub (which you can play for free online). The latter was published by Electronic Arts, which repeated the feat in 1999 with Jane's Fleet Command and in 2001 with Sub Command.

The trend towards accessible mechanics in gaming did a number on the naval warfare genre, but the success of Sea Power shows that the segment was down but not out.

As Sea Power steams toward a full release, the door is now open for other games to bring armchair admirals back onboard.

Sea Power is currently available for PC exclusively via Steam.

Systems

Developer(s) Triassic Games AB

Publisher(s) MicroProse Software

•