I had a few years away from simming about that time so it was only earlier this year that I dusted off my original SH3 DVD - and then bought the on-sale Steam version instead, rather than having to fiddle to get my early, Starforce-DRM protected version running on a post-Vista O/S. Despite being on your own, SH3 must surely rank as one of the most ambitious, most comprehensive and most immersive sims ever made, in any genre. Hence the next in the series, Silent Hunter II, was the one I jumped at - external view AND the ability to fight the Battle of the Atlantic in one of a range of different types of U-boats.Ī few years latter - in 2005 - along came Silent Hunter III, with a similar setting and an excellent, open-ended campaign system, lacking mainly AI subs and therefore the simulation of wolf-pack tactics, where several boats would on radio orders from Befehlshaber der U-Boote (BdU), form, abandon and reform patrol lines across suspected convoy routes, ganging up on any they came across. Besides, it was set in the Pacific, which is well and good but my main interest in subs is in what Churchill famously said was 'the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war' - what he called 'the U-boat peril'. Even then, its graphics were somewhat dated and it had no external view, however good it might otherwise have been. It's up to you to see what features you expect, or give importance to.U-33 goes to war in the epic U-boat sim - that's still being improved!īack in the day, I remember buying a bargain bin, jewel-cased CD release of the original Silent Hunter WW2 submarine simulation. And maybe the rest matters more to hardcore subsim players than for newcomers. They seem to complain about bugs a lot, but this may be corrected by now. If these specialists of submarine simuation still claim, at the age of SH5, that SH3 is the best, it probably means something. If I remeber well, I had skipped SH3 for its lack of dynamic campaign, or something like that.īut I suspect that the subsims website can be trusted. I've bought SH4 recently, and not tried it yet. These games are very immersive (hm, yes), and demand a lot of time, shut from everything else. I had played a bit of SH2 since, but not as much, because sub sims are very very time consuming (one attack can last hours, if you're pinned by tenacious destroyers). The one I've played most was Aces of the Deep and it was impressively great. Ubisoft's DRM policy made that series incompatible with me. It does not allow the player to complete the entire war, nor follow the Type II - Type VII - Type IX - Type XXI career progression that players have come to expect." SH5 does not deliver on any of these metrics, with the exception of opening up the whole U-boat to the player. A couple years back I was asked what I thought was the next step for subsims, I said, "compelling radio traffic, complex objectives like shadowing convoys, genuine wolfpack activity, more role-playing with the crew, and full boat access". That title still belongs to Silent Hunter III. "SH5 has broken new ground with the full boat access and amazing graphics, but it's not the best U-boat sim ever made. I don't think you'll want to get that far back, but both were less complete and complex than the more modern sms, so, they were good introductions. You'll see, they're like whole different genres.Īlso, my entrance in the world of subsims was through silent service (and 688 attack sub, you can see the caracteristic gameplay differences) on the amiga. I think you'll have to play both, eventually. It's the same difference between firing air-air missiles beyond the horizon and machine-gunning another plane. U-Boote are close visual attacks and evasion. SSN are distant, blind, electronic warfare. They both provide very different experiences. The point is : you can't replace a SSN simulation with a diesel-electric u-boot smulation, or the other way round. It's a different strategy, a different style, a different atmosphere, and a different tension. Using missiles, and long range guided torpedoes, and evading them with counter-mneasures, while checking for contacts on the plotter, and signatures on the waterfall, is very different from using magnetic torpedoes at periscope level after having calculated (more or less manually) a firing solution, and then evading a surface ship's active sonars. I don't think they are different on that respect.Īnd the gameplay is very different. I think the silent hunter -if i remember well- are as realist as 688.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |