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A naval warfare strategy game should not take as long to play as actual naval warfare.

Strategy games are supposed to pit you and opponent against each other, with each side attempting to outwit and outmaneuver the other to gain a tactical advantage. Steel Horizon takes the genre template and adds modern naval warfare. The resulting DS game has multiple problems that turns the mental battle against the computer into a physical battle against the game's design and interface.

Steel Horizon is a turn-based game with a sprinkling of real-time combat. You have a variety of ships to build up your fleet from mission to mission, including battleships, submarines, aircraft carriers, destroyers, cruisers and more. Ships can be grouped in any combination of units to increase that group's firepower, but if the group includes a slower ship, that group's movement will be restricted. Position and movement are based on a traditional grid system, and to engage in combat one must simply get close to an enemy group and attack.

This is easier said than done. The two DS screens show two different views of the map screen. The top half shows an up-close view of the currently selected ship and the bottom screen shows a full map view of the entire level. The maps in the game are very large, and most of the time you will only use a small portion of the available space. The size of the maps means that your units show up as little dots on the touch screen. Making matters worse, the top screen local view shows very little area at once. Fog of war is always on during gameplay, and the top view usually doesn't show all the area in your field of vision. The bottom screen doesn't show fog of war at all. When the action menu is on, which is usually all the time, the bottom map disappears completely, leaving you blind to the position of pretty much everything.

These design choices make Steel Horizon feel like you're driving a parade float. There's only a small window to see what's going on, and because of that restriction you need to drive slowly. Playing through the game feels much the same way. Because you need to constantly double-check your position to see what's going on outside of your limited field of vision (and still inside your visible fog of war field), it can take you several minutes to complete a turn of combat. The process of doing so is very tedious because of the confusing interface and unresponsive controls, but also partly due to the nature of combat.

Upon engaging an opponent, the game switches to a nice-looking 3D battle view on the top screen and a radar map on the bottom screen. Ships begin attacking each other automatically, but you have some control over which ships you can target. At the bottom of the touch screen is a list of the ships in your group. Selecting one will give you the option to move it to a different location, attack a specific opponent, or launch a special attack. Every ship type has a special attack, and they can be used once or twice per battle without penalty. The reason for this is because these real-time engagements only last 60 seconds, after which point you are returned to the map screen. The battle mode looks interesting at first, but soon you realize that you have very little control over the actual outcome of the battle because of the cumbersome interface. What this mode becomes is a minute-long dramatization of what the game should have calculated in an instant to help speed the game along.

If you add up the time it takes to wade through the slow interface, the minute-long battles, the over-sized maps, and the loading screens (yes, loading screens), missions can take an hour or more to complete. There's no sense of joy or satisfaction when you finish a mission—only relief. However, beating one mission will only present you with one that's even longer and more complicated that the previous one. So why even bother with starting the first mission at all?

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