New Missions
While it's pretty obvious that the game would offer a whole new storyline and a whole new set of missions, this time out there's a total of 64 with seven bonus missions. The story and the missions progress into three different branches of the storyline depending how you fare in each mission, giving players an extra incentive to reveal all three outcomes by replaying through the game. Once you've cleared the main storyline of the game, you can unlock those bonus missions that offer some additional challenges. Players can also replay every mission they've successfully completed to get additional parts, rank and funding for updating their ships or research and development of new ship components.
Upgrades Galore
Beyond the other extras in the game, the Warship Design and Construction portion of the game has gotten a major boost in a number of areas. Depending on how deeply you want to delve into this impressive design element, you can create some unique ships using over 250 new upgrades including new aircraft and new weapons. There are now seven different vessel types to work off of including American Brittish and Japanese ship designs. But there's even more meat on the bones of the technology tree in this game: players can develop technology starting from the World War II era all the way to modern day technology and even hypothetical weaponry like railguns and plasma tech.
In the last game there were five areas that you could monkey around with when designing a ship: Air, Engine, Metallurgy, Weapons and Electronics. In Warship Gunner 2 there are seven that players can now tinker and upgrade including ship hull, Automatic Artillery, Missiles, Bridges, Propulsion, Aircraft and Electronics. For players who don't want to get into the complication of conducting R&D and designing a ship from scratch, there's also a new upgrade feature that makes it easy to refit your ship - and there's also a an easy ship design component that idiot-proofs the whole process. Of course getting your hands a little dirty in this system and learning how it works will give players more powerful and dangerous ship designs.
Final Thoughts
Warship Gunner 2 is a sheep in wolves clothing. At first glance gamers will load this game up and think "this is a sim and I'm going to hate it." Well, it's not a simulation game at all and you're going to love it because Warship Gunner 2 is awesome. To what degree that awesome goes we'll detail soon in a full blown review, but if you're itching for some naval combat then you may want to jump the gun and just go out and buy it as soon as it hits retail. For the more cautious types, stay tuned for our review shortly!