The game takes place sometime within the 2030s, and features a conflict between Norway and Russia, who are disputing fishing rights. Tempers rise after a Russian patrol boat fires on a Norwegian fishing boat, and after Norwegian forces seize a faulty Russian oil tanker, the Russians declare war. With the US Navy concentrating on the Chinese in the far east, and the Germans and French sitting this fight out, it's now up to Norway and a few allies to take the fight to the reawakened Russians...
As of 2013, both Turbo Tape and Paradox have ceased supporting the game. However, the game's source code was also released the same year, allowing the game's community to continue playing and modding.
This game provides examples of:
- Boring, but Practical: Submarine-launched heavy torpedoes. Range is short, compared to antiship missiles, and speed is slow, but heavy torps are an almost-guaranteed kill against surface fleets, so long as ASW helos have been neutralised.
- Gondor Calls for Aid: The Norwegians try to get NATO onboard, but NATO as a whole doesn't want to have anything to do with this dustup; the US has relocated its carriers to watch the Chinese, and the French and Germans want to sit this out.
- At the same time however, Norway isn't alone: Britain, Holland, Sweden and Denmark pledge military support, with the Brits being the first reinforcements on-scene.
- Hot Sub-on-Sub Action: Submarines can detect and engage each other with torpedoes. However, most missions start off with opposing subs so far apart that it's very unlikely that they'll get within range of each other before the mission is over. note
- Make the Bear Angry Again: naturally.
- Macross Missile Massacre: It's modern naval combat. Naturally the most common, heart-stopping variety of anti-ship attack is a swarm of cruise missiles, facing off against a huge barrage of surface-launched point defenses.
- Fighters can be set to do this with air to air missiles by using the Battle Planner to order ammunition usage to overkill levels.
- Misguided Missile: earlier marks of the game would have missiles losing sensor lock and then performing physics-defying turns to go after some random target; this was addressed in 1.0.5.
- Multinational Team: The Northern allies ingame, made of Norwegian, British, Danish, Dutch, and Swedish forces.
- Point Defenseless: averted to the gamebreaking point in early patches, where ships' guns had uncanny accuracy against supersonic cruise missiles—often, a single 57mm rapid-firing gun could do what an entire destroyer's worth of SAMs could not. Fixed in the 1.0.4. patch.
- Robot Maid: a joking in-game exchange in the first Russian level has the player character ask his boss if the new secretary was built by the Federal Space Agency. The boss replies jokingly that she's actually a high-tech samovar: squeeze the right tit for tea and the left for milk.
- Save-Game Limits: Well, you can't save at all. In quite a major oversight, the developers either forgot a mid-mission save function or were too rushed to implement one. And with missions lasting usually one, two, or even three hours...well, let's just say that this is by far the biggest complaint against the game. Fortunately campaign progress is saved, and you can pause thereby averting Bladder of Steel.
- Shown Their Work: Very much so, particularly the game map, which is 35 million square kilometers, and accurately simulates the scope of securing the GIUK gap
. - There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Many units can be set to use the maximum amount of ammunition on a single target, using the Battle Planner. Given that ammunition is finite and it takes several hours of game time for a recovered aircraft to return to combat readiness, this is not a recommended tactic.
