Unfortunately, Silent Hunter 4 took some serious depth charging when Ubisoft released and then abandoned it with bugs that seriously impact gameplay. I also played modern versions of the submarine experience – 688 Attack Sub by Electronic Arts which debuted in 1989, Janes’ 688(I) Hunter Killer which represents one of Janes’ best technical study sims of all time (ALL TIME!), and Sonalyst’s Sub Command – but, at least to this old salt, the World War II submarine experience remains the epitome of the submarine hunting experience.
#Silent hunter 5 tutorial series#
I followed the Silent Hunter series from the first blocky and bleepy Commodore 64 version up through Silent Hunter 4, which I play in this after action report. Each time you set out to sea, you never know which you are going be bringing back. Ah yes, submarine warfare is a special kind of warfare – strategy and tactics, emotion and hunches, it’s a hard habit to break once it has gained its hold. Every kill is a trophy, every depth charge a lesson. The sight of a burning and listing tanker hull through your soda-straw periscope would fill your heart with joy one moment and then a single sonar ping from a vengeful enemy destroyer would instantly fill it with cold fear.
#Silent hunter 5 tutorial full#
The hours of patrolling empty seas, many attempts and frequent failures to infiltrate heavily defended convoys were more than paid in full when those torpedos hit. Nothing on emergency manoeuvres, your deck guns, hunting tactics, logistics or your crew, and don't think you'll learn any of this stuff in the manual, which is a flimsy bare cupboard of a thing.Although my first sim crush was Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, my first true love was Silent Hunter. The way the game starts you off as a First Officer doing a Captain's bidding is the smartest introduction this series has ever had, so it's a bit surprising when your schoolin' ends after the game's done nothing but make you fire some torpedoes at stationary merchant vessels and dock in a port. So, a taxing simulation of the North Sea in more ways than one.Īnother early problem is the game's tutorial, or lack of one. Running the game at the high speeds required to travel large distances, the frame-rate often falls into unbearable choppiness. This is the first game I've seen my 2.4GHz quad-core with 6GB RAM and a Radeon X1900 struggle with, even on reasonable settings. Let's start with it being a chubby system hog. I cannot believe they shouldered this game out the door. Silent Hunter 3 was a buggy game at release, Silent Hunter 4 more so. But what I didn't know, clicking through those realism checkboxes in Silent Hunter 5, is that this game comes with way more little difficulties than the ones you can chose. This has always been an unforgiving series. And then that haunting conclusion: the depth charges, the flickering lighting, the spraying valves, the God-groan of your penile vessel being warped by unknowable pressure. You get to wield this awesome power and send 20,000 tons of cargo to the bottom of the ocean with each successful torpedo salvo, but there's also the terror of being sighted, of the emergency dive, of your crew whispering to one another so the enemy hydrophones don't pick you up. The Silent Hunter games have always excelled at this. My heart's saying no, but my body's telling me yes. I want to mark this game up for giving you a First Officer with an eye-patch. The only thing more horrible than successfully torpedoing four ships and watching them catch fire and sink out in the freezing, inky wetness a thousand miles from anywhere is being on the other side of that coin, in a hunted sub.
Which is to say life was basically the worst thing. Riffing off the fact that subs in World War II often acted as independent vessels, Silent Hunter gives you your own ship with your own crew and your own mission, and in simply allowing you to prowl the oceans like some phallic sea monster it ends up providing both incredible freedom and an overwhelmingly atmospheric vision of what life was like for all those sailors in WWII. For anyone who hasn't played them, Silent Hunter games are capable of great things. Once again a "Sexual tension as men rub past one another in corridors" checkbox is conspicuous by its absence, and once again I ended up with a history-tastic 70 per cent. Meanwhile the game updates a judgemental "realism" percentage at the bottom of the screen. As usual for this World War II u-boat sim series, your first task in Silent Hunter 5 is going into the options and filling out a long checkbox questionnaire while the game holds a protractor and set square up to your masculinity.
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