Silent Hunter III (PC)

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The Free View camera allows you to take a closer look at your enemies

When you treat Silent Hunter III as a simulation, rather than a game, the experience becomes much more atmospheric. The real heart of the game is the career mode. You can start a career with the Kriegsmarine from any point between the last few months of 1939 up to 1943. This allows you to either sample the whole range of U-Boats, from the small Type-II up to the later, ocean-going Type-IX and Type XXI U-boats, (which are more heavily armed and better equipped), or, for the ultimate challenge, to take a Captain from the beginning of the war in 1939 all the way to its conclusion in 1945. Doing this will require considerable time, effort, skill and dedication. If you average 30 days per war patrol, a full war-time campaign will last around 60 voyages, eating up a couple of hours each. The motivation to develop one Captain's career is provided by the accumulation of "Renown" after a successful war patrol. This "Renown" quantifies your standing in the Kriegsmarine, and can be used to "buy" anything from more experienced crew members; new equipment (such as better radars or deck guns) all the way up to newer models of U-boat. Your crew, likewise, can gain qualifications and experience as they complete war patrols, making them perform tasks (such as detecting contacts on sonar, or reloading torpedoes) more efficiently. Each crewman has stats for Morale, Endurance and Resilience. The effects of morale and endurance are fairly self explanatory (if they fall too low, their efficiency at performing tasks likewise plummets), but their resilience stat doesn't appear to have been implemented in any way. Even after a couple of simulated hours being pummelled by depth charges, with the hull creaking and leaking, nothing appears to happen to it, making you wonder why on Earth it's there at all.

As your crew gains more experience, and you gain the renown to buy better equipment and more capable boats, the challenge presented to you steadily increases as the war drags on. It's a sobering thought to realise that Germany's top U-boat Captain, Otto Kretschmer, probably only survived the war because he spent the last three and a half years of it in an Allied concentration camp. By the beginning of 1945 the average U-boat crew was lucky to survive a single war patrol, the threat posed by Allied air cover and convoy screening ships was so great. This is more than adequately reflected in the simulation, with airborne attacks becoming much more frequent, and destroyers becoming more adept at detecting you with their sonar, so the importance of generating enough renown over the course of a long career in order to get the very best equipment quickly becomes apparent.

the game really is best played with the realism aids turned off

A player who approaches Silent Hunter III with a simulation mindset and a willingness to devote entire afternoons to the title will undoubtedly get more out of it than a casual gamer. This isn't to say that you need to play it at 100% realism to get any measure of enjoyment out of it. On the contrary, very few people will be able to manually calculate torpedo solutions, and derive any sort of enjoyment out of it. That said, the game really is best played with the realism aids turned off. The external cameras and stealth indicator in particular are completely superfluous additions to the game that only serve to diminish the sense of immersion critical to a simulation. I don't object to developers making a game accessible to play, but it is best not to do it at the expense of providing any sort of challenge at all.

Unfortunately, a lot of your time will be spent here

As a game, Silent Hunter III is (if you'll forgive the pun) sub-standard. It has the looks, but doesn't provide the consistent, frequent thrills to please the average gamer. Even the multiplayer mode is fairly redundant, with just four co-operative scenarios on offer. As a simulation, it's satisfying without being exceptional in anything except its graphics. With significant flaws in the crew management system and a few interface difficulties - the navigation map, for example, will happily let you plot a course intersecting the harbour wall or any other land mass without giving you any warning at all, meaning you can make a trip to Davy Jones's Locker before your career has even left port - it fails to surpass the experience of the original title in the franchise, which is now a good ten years old. Whilst a considerable improvement upon its immediate predecessor, Silent Hunter III's halfway-house game design prevents it from entering the Submariner's Hall of Fame. If there is one genuine positive to be taken, it's that Silent Hunter III already seems to have a vibrant modding scene, which is already churning out bespoke missions and other mods by the dozen, thanks to the bundled mission editor, which may well turn out to be the title's ultimate saving grace...

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