Combat boating game is flawed but fun

On paper, "Blood Wake" sounds like solid gold.

In action, however, there's more than a bit of lead in the mix.

"Blood Wake," developed by Stormfront Studios for the Xbox, is an ambitious attempt to finally create a high-quality nautical combat game. If the past teaches us anything, it's that waterborne battles are tough.

Stormfront also helped sink the game by firing a few rounds into its own feet with some strange decisions.

The plot seemingly takes up half the instruction manual, but let's boil it down. You play as a young lieutenant, presumably in China, who is captured and forced to fight for Shadow Clan against its enemies, the Jade Kingdom and the Iron Empire.

The story itself isn't awful, but it progresses between missions with the use of a voice-over as pages turn on the screen. You don't meet actual moving people in "Blood Wake," you just hear them. I quit watching after the first few; it was just too much torture.

Between-mission movies would have been a far superior way of introducing characters you might actually care about.

You do your fighting from a variety of speedy warships, using machine guns, cannon, torpedoes, rockets, mines and a few high-tech weapons to dispatch wooden junks and a collection of other enemy vessels.

Start the game and prepare to be dazzled. The water effects are the best I've ever seen by a factor of 10. The water, the waves, whitecaps -- it all looks as real as possible. The boats also are amazingly detailed; you can almost count the boards in the junks as they zip past, guns blazing.

There are more than two dozen missions, plenty to keep you busy, but they almost all involve exactly the same actions -- attacking enemy ships or firing on land targets. You can race around and shoot them, or sit still and shoot them, but there's not much else to do.

Graphics get an A+. They are spectacular. Add the excellent physics, with beautiful wave effects, and you have the best-looking water-based game of all time.

Control is a B. Once you get the hang of maneuvering your boat, you can make it all but fly.

Sound gets a B. The sounds of the water, the roar of your boat's engines, the guns, the explosions, all make for a solid aural experience. The main drawback is those lame between-mission voice-overs.

This is one time when the total is far less than the sum of the parts. Great graphics can't make a boring game exciting, and while you'll be dazzled by what you're seeing on the screen, you'll likely be putting "Blood Wake" away well before the last enemy boat sinks.