E3 2008: PT Boats: Knights of the Sea Impressions - Quick Updates

It's the last day of E3 2008, but we still had a chance to catch up with PT Boats: Knights of the Sea, the long-in-development hybrid naval simulation/strategy game from Akella. PT Boats, which has been in development for about six years, chronicles the World War II conflict from the perspective of either the Allied forces, the Germans, or the Soviet Union. The game will have a campaign for each side with about a dozen missions apiece that will involve bringing gunships into naval battles in the service of your country. Interestingly, you can play the game as either a real-time strategy game as you control a flotilla of up to six other ships and give group orders or as a simulation that lets you control a single boat.

As you can probably guess from the game's lengthy development cycle, PT Boats' development team seems committed to creating an authentic naval battle experience, regardless of how much time it takes. We watched a demonstration of the simulation gameplay, which not only lets you control your boat from a close-in third-person view that shows various seamen at their duties of manning antiair flak cannons, navigating, and swabbing the poop deck, but also lets you take a first-person view. In the first-person view, you can see and explore the entire ship, from the first mate to the navigation and engine controls to the guns. Though we were able to see the game only briefly, we did watch a short German defense mission that required our PT boat to flush out enemies in our waters. Unfortunately, enemy fighter planes proved too much for us and crippled the ship and slaughtered the crew with strafing fire, leaving our ship and crew dead in the water.

It's unfortunate that we didn't get more of an opportunity to see the game in motion, but PT Boats seems like it's trying to create a realistic naval simulation experience that hardcore simulation fans will likely enjoy. The game is scheduled for release at the end of the year.