Sometimes it's just a matter of scale. Combination action/strategy World War 2 naval games exist - I do believe if you look here you'll see another one - but PT Boats: Knights of the Sea is a smaller scale, primarily European theater game of that sort.
The premise is fairly straight forward - you control a squadron of ships, either German, Allied, or Soviet, depending on the campaign. You can pick if you want to just do the action side of things and man the guns, or if you want to be tactical and just give orders, but the best players will do a combination of both. Each campaign has 8-12 missions to accomplish.
When working with your squadron you are able to pick out not only which boat you wish to control but also which position. If you select the captain, for instance, you can steer and adjust the throttle, both of which are shown in realistic format. Man the guns and it's up to you to try to sink enemy ships or shoot down enemy airplanes. You'll constantly have new objectives to face.
What will really catch gamers, and especially both historically and naval minded gamers, is the mind-boggling amount of detail that the game includes. The graphics on the game are very good, but the detail is amazing.
We watched the developer (basically) get his German squadron sunk. As the ships plow through the water you can see the crewmembers move back and forth on the ship. When his ships took their inevitably fatal damage, bodies flew through the air and surviving crew members could be seen jumping off the ship and attempting to swim away from the carnage.
Even as the ship sank you could move the camera underwater for what appeared to be a realistic view of the ship as it settled its way down to the bottom.
I'm a 29 year old senior network and systems engineer for a consulting firm in the DC area. I'm mostly into MMOs and FPSes (on the console), and I'm a big pro football fan. In my other spare time I like to write and tend to read copious amounts of history and military sci-fi. I'm also into cooking and bad action movies.
