I genuinely haven't found anything that scratches the same itch this game does. Ultimately it's very similar to a MOBA (no wait where are you going) in that you've got ultimate control over a single, small entity trying to exert individual influence amidst your team's broader strategy - gaining vision, exerting map control, positioning around objectives. In actuality, though, this is so much slower than any MOBA I've played, and it's brilliantly tense as a result. When turning your ship, turning your guns, and reloading each take between 3-30 seconds, you feel the full weight of committing to each action. If you don't, you die to someone who does.
As a result it feels so much better to play than a World of Tanks or a War Thunder, games where you're not really forced to make decisions, where you can just show up to a battle and play chicken with your enemies over and over without really thinking that you've done anything wrong. Sure, the community is still under the impression that there are pay-to-win ships that let you turn your brain off, but the reality is that - at the average person's skill level - you can style on any $30 premium ship by using your brain a little.
And you really get to savor it when you outsmart someone, too. In part, this is due to the pace: If someone positions poorly, you'll get plenty of time to line up a clean shot. Fire torpedoes around an island and watch as an enemy player scrambles desperately to dodge them before losing a massive chunk of their health bar. You'd think all of this would mean that the enemy player is having an awful time, but it's much better than you'd expect. That slow pace often means that very few scenarios feel like certain death - there's a lot of room to wiggle yourself out of any bad situation unless you've REALLY messed up.
But the feedback? The player feedback tho? Incredible. In a game that's mostly pretty quiet, any sound will be attention grabbing, but World of Warships tries to earn that attention anyway by making sure that every salvo leaving your guns sounds like a peal of thunder, that every torpedo dodged ratchets the tension up five- or ten-fold as the alarms grow increasingly shrill, only so you can breathe a sigh of relief as they fade into silence again. Each shot that lands is rewarded with a ribbon and a brief but subtle sound effect, with truly damaging hits often decorating your screen with an entire rainbow as the opponent's ears are left ringing. To say you'll be "immersed" in a game where your camera floats hundreds of meters above the era's largest ships sounds like fiction, but any WoWS player can tell you what it feels like to stare a laser through their monitor as they dodge a torpedo by a hair's breadth - it's absolutely thrilling.
As a result it feels so much better to play than a World of Tanks or a War Thunder, games where you're not really forced to make decisions, where you can just show up to a battle and play chicken with your enemies over and over without really thinking that you've done anything wrong. Sure, the community is still under the impression that there are pay-to-win ships that let you turn your brain off, but the reality is that - at the average person's skill level - you can style on any $30 premium ship by using your brain a little.
And you really get to savor it when you outsmart someone, too. In part, this is due to the pace: If someone positions poorly, you'll get plenty of time to line up a clean shot. Fire torpedoes around an island and watch as an enemy player scrambles desperately to dodge them before losing a massive chunk of their health bar. You'd think all of this would mean that the enemy player is having an awful time, but it's much better than you'd expect. That slow pace often means that very few scenarios feel like certain death - there's a lot of room to wiggle yourself out of any bad situation unless you've REALLY messed up.
But the feedback? The player feedback tho? Incredible. In a game that's mostly pretty quiet, any sound will be attention grabbing, but World of Warships tries to earn that attention anyway by making sure that every salvo leaving your guns sounds like a peal of thunder, that every torpedo dodged ratchets the tension up five- or ten-fold as the alarms grow increasingly shrill, only so you can breathe a sigh of relief as they fade into silence again. Each shot that lands is rewarded with a ribbon and a brief but subtle sound effect, with truly damaging hits often decorating your screen with an entire rainbow as the opponent's ears are left ringing. To say you'll be "immersed" in a game where your camera floats hundreds of meters above the era's largest ships sounds like fiction, but any WoWS player can tell you what it feels like to stare a laser through their monitor as they dodge a torpedo by a hair's breadth - it's absolutely thrilling.