Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Ubisoft Romania

 

INTRODUCTION

German U-boat simulations have intrigued PC gamers for decades. The reason for this may be attributed to the stakes, achievements, and the overwhelming odds the U-boat crewmen faced during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II. It’s the longing to command these boats, that can slip away underneath the dark-blue ocean swells after letting-go a salvo of torpedoes towards a helpless convoy, that draws PC gamers to such sims. The infamous 1981 U-boat movie Das Boot, with its shrieking sonar pings and nerve-breaking depth charges, also endorsed this helpless struggle; setting off an avalanche of interested fans and wanna-be U-boat captains.

The Silent Hunter series provided the opportunity for these people to do what they desired.  With the first one being released in 1996 on the MS-DOS platform (with US submarines in the Pacific War), then the second in 2001, and finally Silent Hunter III in 2005; the number of Silent Hunter fans grew exponentially. Silent Hunter III is worth mentioning because it delivered an immense campaign, a revolutionary mission editor, and a 3D interactive U-boat interior and crew. The game was revolutionary with its extraordinary scope and enormous replayability, raising the standard for all submarine simulations succeeding it. In the fourth sequel submariners were taken back to the Pacific in Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific, but Ubisoft noticed right away that the Pacific War wasn’t as appealing—it just didn’t require the courage and lacked the insuperable odds of the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. In consequence, they created an add-on for Silent Hunter 4 in an attempt to draw in those diehard U-boat simulation lovers. But the exclusive adventures of the Monsun Gruppe just weren’t the same, thus the thousands of fans looked to the horizon (Ubisoft’s latest release) for an updated version of Silent Hunter III with modern-day graphics. This brings us to the release of Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic, which was released in 2010. Did Ubisoft’s latest release draw all these fans away from their five-year-old Silent Hunter III? Or did it fall short of expectations?

 

THE GAME

Silent Hunter 5 (aka SH5) has given us fantastic graphics and lighting effects, all with a Hollywood twist. Its prequel, Silent Hunter 4, was a huge graphical improvement over its predecessor SH3; and SH5 is even better than SH4 in this area. SH5 has done this through several water streams running off the U-boat exteriors, icicles forming in arctic climates, incredible water reflections, and eerily realistic-like underwater scenes. But there’s more, with an interactive U-boat crew, the game offers the ability to walk from bow-to-stern through the interior of your U-boat through a first-person POV. Ducking under bulkheads, squeezing through hatches, and staying clear of spraying water/steam from pipes damaged by depth charges, are just some of the features offered when you’re not on deck.

If you’re thinking that it’s all fun-and-games below deck, well think again. Unlike its predecessors, SH5 has to be controlled through orders given directly to the men in charge of the department you want to give orders to. That means you (the captain) has to run up-and-down the boat to giving orders to your engineer to increase speed or to tell the radio operator to send a contact message about your U-boat status back to Admiral Karl Dönitz at BdU. As you may imagine, this can get tiresome, but there is one way around it: learning the keyboard shortcuts for the game. Learning these shortcuts will make your job of commanding the U-boat easier, but that’s not as easy as it sounds. Many keys are used as shortcuts and remembering such a layout is time consuming and shouldn’t be a necessity. Unfortunately, (unless you prefer running constantly throughout the boat looking like a chicken with its head cut off) SH5 doesn’t give you a choice. Most annoying is that this is an unrealistic way of doing things, as the captain had speaking-tubes in the control room to reach all the various departments in the boat. Also, valuable time can be wasted if you have to run back and forth, like when you need to crash dive to evade a charging destroyer.

The game’s HUD is nearly non-existent, compared to SH3 and SH4. Players used to be able to give instant orders to set engines full-ahead or change your course to bearing 270° just through the dials displayed on the interface; but SH5 doesn’t present players with such an interactive and helpful interface. Not only is this annoying, but with this very limited HUD, players used to the HUDs of the previous games will be dumbfounded once they get into SH5. To top it all off, the originally released keyboard shortcut map in the manual (given to players in electronic form with the game) was incorrect and thus required and update. In turn, the game calls for a lot of patience just to getting used-to, even for experienced PC submariners.

There is also another reason for walking throughout the U-boat: to increase the morale of your men. The game requires the captain to talk to his men to raise their spirits while you’re on patrol. This is a nice add-on to the series, but I think it would have served better as an optional way to raise morale rather than the only way. The previous games had crew management systems which made this process much easier. All one had to do was go to the crew management screen and switch men around to-and-from the sleeping quarters so the men were refreshed/replenished allowing the boat to continue functioning. So in SH5 one has to build a rapport with their men: asking questions about their family, requesting the cook to prepare special meals, etc… But just wait one second! Don’t think you can just sit and chat all day with one of your seamen, because you can’t. The options for dialogue are limited leaving us with only two or three options to choose from. You can return later on in your patrol to ask additional question but you can’t have a sustained and continuous conversation with any one crewmember. In addition, only about half of the crew throughout the boat is approachable for conversation. Many of the crew don’t have a dialogue option, making the whole giving-orders and boosting morale system half-way broken. If you the captain can only reach half the visible crew, then these systems obviously don’t offer a realistic manner in dealing with these issues. Also, the Type 7 U-boat, the one portrayed in SH5, had a crew numbering around fifty men; but the men visible in the interior of the boat is nowhere near this number.

What made SH3 so great was the immense campaign that lasted from September 1, 1939 to the end of the war for Germany in May of 1945. This seven-year timeframe not only portrayed the U-boat campaign accurately but gave players the option to play during the various times when the U-boats faced different problems. Silent Hunter 5, on the other hand, only gives players a campaign lasting from 1939 to 1943. This means you won’t be able to witness the sinking of the Tirpitz by British bombers up in some fjord in Norway, nor will you have the opportunity to use late-war equipment like the snorkel. Though the U-boats had their greatest success between 1939 and 1943, the game is missing the last two crucial years of the war, when the Germans were trying to catch-up with the technological developments of the Allies. These years saw the debut of new inventions, submarine types, and strategies in an effort to turn the tide of the U-boat campaign.

Ubisoft has also claimed to have added a “dynamic campaign” to SH5. This means, when players go through the campaign their actions (accomplishments, mistakes, etc…) will be reflected by the game. The campaign will evolve according to how the player plays the campaign, giving them “some” options in how the campaign advances. But the system is incomplete. Regardless of how well one plays through the campaign, it will still end in 1943; one cannot extend the length of the campaign. In addition, the campaign isn’t entirely dynamic: for example, when one sinks a capital ship in some harbor somewhere that ship will still show up in consecutive patrols. The game also has a new way of handling objectives. Now, instead of just assigning patrol grids to occupy for a certain amount of time, the objectives are more task-oriented like sinking a certain amount warships in a specific area. Though, this aspect is still a little buggy and can make one frustrated, especially when the results aren’t recorded after a successful patrol.

Another unfortunate aspect to the game is the U-boats types available for humans to control. SH5 only offers three U-boat versions to captain: Type VIIA, Type VIIB, and Type VII. By contrast, SH3 lets players control eleven different U-boat variations: Type IIA, IID, VIIB, VIIC, VIIC/41, VIIC/42, IXB, IXC, IXC/40, IXD2, and XXI. Although, SH5 has done a great job at representing the Type VII boat, providing us with accurate interiors and exteriors for the three variants. But, even though the Type VII U-boat was considered “the workhorse” and it played a major role in the U-boat campaigns during the war, by no means does it represent the complete U-boat involvement in WW2. To exclude the other U-boat types means excluding vitally important events and campaigns that have forever symbolized their efforts and accomplishments during the war. For example, not representing the Type II in the game means players will not be able to reenact the famous sinking of the HMS Royal Oak in Scapa Flow by the U-47. Nor will players be able to reenact, because of the absence of the Type IX, the Monsun Gruppe operations in the Indian/Pacific Oceans or the patrols off the US Eastern Seaboard.

Other annoying aspects of this one include crewmembers that have eye-patches and a DRM anti-piracy online service platform. I almost immediately noticed that my navigation officer had an eye-patch, while I was going through the brief, confusing, and nearly useless tutorial that’s available at the beginning of the campaign. When I see someone with an eye-patch it reminds me of pirates, or some sort of villain; but U-boat crewmen were no such thing. Pirates, technically, don’t represent a nation nor are they part of a nation’s military. Villains, well if you want to label these brave men who fought for a cause of their own “bad guys” then that’s just a shallow way to look at things.

The DRM system was attempt by Ubisoft to quell software piracy and was announced in January 2010. Though the cause is noble, the strategy is flawed. It requires all Silent Hunter 5 players to be connected to the internet at ALL times in order to play the game. As one can imagine, this can raise a number of problems. People with internet connection problems will have a hard time playing the game which may include: ISP doing maintenance, users with a lot of internet downloading/uploading activity, faulty routers/modems/network cards, users on an unreliable or multiple wireless networks, dial-up modem users that also use their LAN line for a telephone, or just people wanting to play SH5 on their laptop while on the move. To add, you’ll have a hard time finding a laptop that that has enough juice to handle this game because it’s been poorly optimized. Even my ferocious desktop system gets a little uncomfortable playing it. As you might have guessed, connecting to online games with other players is also a challenge; partly because of the DRM system and that it’s a resource hog.

 

IN CONCLUSION

I’ll give Ubisoft credit for “attempting” to please the thousands of Silent Hunter III looking for an updated version of that game with modern-day graphics. But in doing so, it seems Ubisoft has taken away the good parts of SH3 in order to add new features to a sequel, Silent Hunter 5. The game’s graphics, immersion, U-boat interiors, and semi-dynamic campaign are very exciting features to see in a submarine simulator; but they don’t make up for its shortcomings. The shortcomings are numerous and include a poorly developed interface, exhausting command system, and a brief tutorial that lacks any useful information. If you’ve got the patience to keep playing through the learning curve, you might get fed-up with the unimaginative DRM anti-piracy platform, the buggy objectives system, the low frames-per-second, or just the petty officers that look like pirates. SH5 also lacks the features offered in SH3 with a shorter timeframe with a much smaller number of playable submarines. I strongly feel the developers should have spent more time on the game, adding these missing features. For reasons I can’t explain, Ubisoft has released a game that has fewer features and has drawn less attention than its predecessor’s predecessor. But sadly, here we are.

 

The Good: Beautiful exterior (water reflections, water streams, shadows, etc…) and interior (crew, detailed U-boat interior, etc…) graphics, fantastic Hollywood-like explosions, immersive game play

The So-So: A semi-dynamic campaign that “sort of” offers a changing campaign but lacks the ability to remove sunken ships from the campaign layer, an interactive but not extensive crew and dialogue, a new morale-boosting technique which isn’t optional, a new and buggy objectives structure through the assignment of specific tasks, a new system for giving orders which requires a lot of work from the player, loading times can be horrendous

The Bad: A short and nearly useless tutorial, lacks a familiar or useful HUD which requires one to remember keyboard shortcuts, an electronic manual that lacks vital information accompanied with low-resolution images, a campaign that doesn’t last the whole war and therefore doesn’t represent the U-boat war effectively, only provides three playable U-boats which is eight less than that offered in Silent Hunter III, annoying but well-intentioned DRM online platform, multiplayer games still buggy, stresses even the best desktop systems

Does the game have a permanent spot on Curtis’ hard drive? Unfortunately, yes. The reason for this is not because of the vanilla game itself, but because of the mods available and soon to be available that will fix many of the broken aspects listed above. Not only do these mods fix problems, they also add features making the game more comparable to SH3. Another reason why I keep it on my hard drive is because I’m a huge fan of the Silent Hunter series.

 

Review Written By:  Curtis Szmania, Staff Writer

 

Reviewer’s Specs:

• AMD Phenom II 955 BE Quad-Core Processor Overclocked @ 3.7Ghz

• 8GB of DDR3 RAM Overclocked @ 1666 MHz

• ATI HD 6850 1GB Overclocked @ 1030 MHz GPU and 1175 MHz Memory

• Windows XP Professional x64 Edition