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Genre: Turn-based strategy

Format: CD

Developer: Sprue Games

Mac Publisher: Shrapnel Games

Minimum System Requirements: 1GHz G4, Mac OS X v10.1.5, 256MB RAM, 500MB free hard disk space

Review Computer: 1GHz Powerbook G4 12" 768MB RAM, 32MB GeForce FX Go 5200

Network Feature: No

Price: $39.95

ESRB Rating: N/A

Availability: Now

Official Website: www.shrapnelgames.com

Back in the bad old days, Mac game BBSs and file servers would often be awash in crappy HyperCard games called DOOM II HELL ON WINDOWS AOL OMG!!!11 that would inevitably be one-click affairs produced by some dumb kid in a vain effort to console himself and his fellow dumb Mac-using kids after they watched the cool kids at school play Doom on their dad's work PC. Don't get me wrong, now; HyperCard was fantastic for making interactive presentations, but aside from scenic adventures like Myst, you could hardly expect it to handle something like, say, WarCraft. This isn't to say that people didn't try to test the limits of HyperCard's potential for game-making, it just didn't turn out too well.

As it turns out, this ancient history is directly relevant to Salvo, today's hot topic. While Salvo is a highly detailed, in-depth look at naval warfare, it suffers from a general lack of technical polish that makes the game accessible only to those already fixated upon the subject matter. Making presentations or interactive apps in Macromedia Director is one thing; making commercial-quality games is another.

Salvo is all about naval combat; specifically, naval combat back when navies were still big things (think 17th, 18th and 19th century) and pirates stole pieces of eight instead of Sony PSPs. Neither the graphics nor the sound are much to speak of, and the plot consists of a few sentences for each chapter at most describing the historical context of whatever maritime ass-whooping you're about to undertake. This is not a bad thing, necessarily; I dig games that are heavily focused on whatever it is that makes them good. While each mission you get will have different mission objectives—ranging from finding a safe berth to hunting pirates to whatever—it all boils down to cannons and shot and grappling hooks and rigging and how to balance the numbers just right. There isn't much in the way of macro-level strategy a la Civilization III; rather than worry about technology trees and farm production and whatnot, for any given turn in Salvo you'll have to take stock of how your ship (or ships) are doing, optimizing the crew allocation to your ideal balance between maintenance, movement, and offense, position your ship in the most advantageous position vis a vis range, wind direction, and firing angles, choose the ideal load-out of your cannons in accordance with your battle strategy (going for a quick kill vs. disabling the enemy ship, for example). It's not easy, but for the turn-based tacticians out there who love to obsess about this kind of stuff, Salvo is definitely the game for you.

Salvo's game design is facilitated by a fairly Mac-friendly interface that is inspired by some classic computer turn-based strategy titles. However, without all of the clumsy resource management or economic development stuff that plays a heavy role in, say, Alpha Centauri or Master of Orion 2, Salvo's emphasis on ship, squadron, or fleet combat clears up the screen quite wonderfully. Rather than spend hours learning the interface, Salvo gets away with a few relatively uncomplicated dialogue boxes that a few minutes in the tutorial can explain well enough. While managing entire fleets can be kind of a chore at times, the interface makes it less of a problem than it could have been; you can specify certain ships to obey general orders sent to the entire squadron, or even set them on autopilot, if you'd like. Information on any ship is readily available, either by right-clicking on the ship in the main screen or through a comprehensive list of every ship involved in the level. There's no doubt that Salvo is meant for the number-crunchers, and Salvo knows that. Perhaps the only downside is that the actual clickable spaces in Salvo are a little bit hard to get used to; I found that for the first hour or two of play I had a hard time getting the game to actually do what I wanted it to do just because the click detection felt a little bit off.

Unfortunately, while the gameplay and the interface are solid, the rest of Salvo kind of drags it all down. I mentioned earlier that the graphics and sound were uninspired; honestly, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The visuals are reminiscent of Doom's attempt to make the illusion of 3D space with 2D sprites; not a bad thing per se, but in Salvo's case, the visuals themselves are highly pixelated sprites with "jaggies" (unpleasantly sharp, jagged vertices) all over the place, and the animation feels like you're looking at a three-frame animated GIF circa 1997. Now, I have a fairly high tolerance for poor animation and pixelated sprites (I played Myth on a 180MHz Mac with no graphics hardware at about 9 frames per second, so watch out), and yet trying to perform basic operations like scroll around the camera felt unbearably choppy, to the point where the ship I was trying to navigate would seem to inexplicably disappear offscreen. Camera controls also felt rather clumsy; I'm not sure whether it was due to Director's own inefficiency or Salvo's own developmental sluggishness, but Salvo's camera suffered from tremendous input lag—often as many as a few seconds—that made navigating a veritable pain in the, uh, aft.

All in all, Salvo is a good game rendered in a bad engine. Certainly, the attention to detail and gameplay depth is admirable, and anyone with a pre-existing interest in the nuances and subtleties of naval warfare should check it out, as it's definitely a well-thought out game. Unfortunately, Salvo falls victim to the trap of technological limitation; as well-thought out as it is, everything Salvo does right is weighed down by the poor execution. I'm completely convinced that Salvo is a very thoroughly fleshed-out tactical naval warfare simulator, but it's feeling growing pains from being trapped in the clumsy Director engine, which simply makes the game too unapproachable to anyone not already hooked on the idea of micromanaging a fleet of Britain's finest.