Despite its seemingly unusual premise, Submarine Titans is a rather conventional 2D real-time strategy game that takes place in an underwater setting. It features three different playable factions and several interesting units and technologies, as well as a complicated and fairly original resource model - and of course, the aquatic setting itself. However, the game's slow pacing, simple combat, weak production values, and other shortcomings collectively prevent Submarine Titans from being much fun.

You play Submarine Titans from an isometric perspective, as with most any other 2D real-time strategy game. An interface bar covers the bottom portion of the game screen, and while it's obtrusively large at the lowest resolution setting, Submarine Titans supports resolutions up to 1280x1024, in which there's plenty of room to see what's happening. The interface is split down the middle, and it lets you oversee base infrastructure and unit micromanagement simultaneously; it's an effective design, although the interface buttons themselves aren't intuitive, nor are the names and appearances of the various structures and submarines that you can build at any point. In fact, sometimes it's very difficult to identify a submarine amidst its surroundings, as the structures and submarines are drawn with the same exact colors, which tend to blend together. Otherwise, Submarine Titans' 2D graphics are fairly detailed, and the copious amounts of undersea life scuttling about lend a lot of detail to the environment, but you'll just as quickly realize that almost all the maps in the game look identical. And furthermore, the game doesn't really provide a good sense of being underwater, because sea creatures and a sea-color tint aren't enough - some sort of shimmering or color-cycling effect would have helped convey the sense that Submarine Titans actually takes place under the ocean.

Submarine Titans has a very steep learning curve, partly because the interface and technology take getting used to, but especially because the single-player campaign missions are very difficult from the outset. Each of the game's three different factions has its own ten-mission campaign, and you can play the campaigns in any order. Even though you can toggle the level of the computer artificial intelligence, Submarine Titans will initially prove to be much harder than most similar real-time strategy games, even on the weakest setting. Some players will doubtless appreciate the challenge, but most will sooner find the campaigns to be unbalanced - either way, the campaigns certainly aren't very interesting. Though Submarine Titans has an elaborate back story that's detailed in the manual, each mission is introduced simply with scrolling text and a plain voiceover. These introductions are usually long and not very clear, while the actual mission objectives tend to be either predictable defense- or offense-oriented scenarios or escort missions. Fortunately, you can also play single scenarios against one or more computer opponents or take on other players over a network or the Internet. Submarine Titans also includes a seperate scenario-editor program with a random-map generator.

The game's three playable sides - the militant White Sharks, the scientific Black Octopi, and the mysterious alien Silicons - aren't as different as their stories make them out to be. The former two are functionally identical with the exception of their slightly varied technology trees, while the latter one uses a different resource model and has different types of military submersibles. Part of the problem is that Submarine Titans simply lacks character - the unit-acknowledgment speech clips used for each side are not only repetitive and boring, but also identical for every unit in the faction; similarly, each unit in the game blows up in just the same fashion when it's destroyed. The graphics and design of Submarine Titans are clearly derivative of Blizzard's hit Starcraft, even though Starcraft did a much better job differentiating its three factions. Ultimately, each side in Submarine Titans has analogous structures and defenses, but since they look different - and none of their functions are immediately obvious - it'll take you a while to figure out how to play the game.