Destroyer, bearing 133, closing fast!

I'd never heard of submarine sims / games before this one. I came across it quite by mistake and downloaded some of the preview videos and screenshots from various sites. The graphics were enough to make me want to see more, plus I like strategy games, so I Amazon'd a copy and a week later it arrived.

I installed it and it asked if I wanted to install GameShadow which is Ubisoft's game update system. Straight away it found a patch for the game so I allowed that to be installed, then rebooted and fired it up.

I've not played any of the previous titles, nor any other submarine games, so don't have a yardstick to compare Silent Hunter III to. So I'll review it "as is".

The intro is pretty good - faux-old-film which is actually CGI from in-game footage with some post-processing. Once you get into the main menu there's a few options available to you. The best bet to get started is the Naval Academy. Working your way through the tutorials / exams in here gains you 'renown'. Renown is the measure of your skill in the game - higher renown means more options available later on, so doing the tutorials is a good way to get a head start.

Once you're done in the tutorials, you can either do single mission, multiplayer or career mode. The first two are pretty obvious and I recommend diving (pun intended) into career mode. Choose a flotilla and a starting year and off you go.

Silent Hunter III is entirely set in World War 2, and you're a German U-Boat commander. Why Germany? No matter which way you look at it, the Germans defined submarine warfare so it seems like an obvious choice. The starting year determines how aware the allies are of the U-boat threat, and how far their airpower can reach. Starting in 1939 for example is easy pickings for the first couple of missions - the allies are still largely unaware of the threat. Start in 1943 and you'll literally be sunk.

Graphics.
The graphics in SH3 are phenomenal. The interior of the sub has a few compartments you can occupy, each rendered in full 3D, although you can't walk between or around them - each is essentially a fixed eyepoint with pan/tilt capability. All compartments are manned with fully animated crew members and behave accordingly. If you're crash-diving, everyone hangs on to something. If you're in rough seas, the compartment rolls and sways along with the bratwurst hanging from the pipes. If you've been roughed up by depth charges, pipes can spring leaks and start flooding the compartments. At night, everything is lit up in red night lights. Step outside to the conning tower bridge and the scene is amazing. The developers have gone overboard (pun intended again) on the sea states. From gentle swell to full-on storm, the effect is nauseatingly realistic. White caps spray in the wind, rain lashes down, the bow of the submarine throws spray up in your face etc. Excellent. There's also an external free-fly camera which you move around with the mouse and cursor keys. It allows you to view the action from anywhere about 500ft above the surface down to the sea floor. There's no awkward transition between the two - just dive the camera under water and marvel at the undersea lighting effects. When you get into the thick of it, there's also a highlight camera which automatically tracks the action in a small popup window. You can blow it up to full screen and watch what's going on such as a torpedo closing in on its target. Finally, there's a target-cam which allows you to cycle through all the targets in range and examine them.
If you choose to man the deck gun yourself, there's a deck-gun-cam where you can aim and fire yourself. Also on-deck you can see the surroundings by looking around, or by using your binoculars. When below the water, you can not use the deck views (duh!) but you have an attack periscope and an observation periscope.
In all, the graphics are excellent although there's one glaring omission from the game. In the video options, you can't choose different resolutions so you're stuck with what Ubisoft want you to use. I can see why - for some of the information screens, lower resolution would become so cluttered they'd be unusable. The only option you do have is the density of the particle effects. I think that's come in the v1.5 patch because of some issues they had with some Nvidia cards.

Sound.
The sound in SH3 is suitably atmospheric. Subs of that timeframe had diesel and electric engines for when they were on the surface or submerged, and in SH3 you can readily tell the difference between the two when they're running, both from on-deck and inside the sub. The sea effects are great and the explosions from torpedo and artillery hits are well rendered. If you've got a decent sound system with a subwoofer, it makes a definite improvement. As you dive the sub, you'll hear the sounds of the crew closing hatches and coming down ladders. The deeper you go, the more the sub creaks and groans. As in a real submarine (I Guess), sound is everything. If you're being hunted down by a surface ship, dive the sub and tell the chief engineer to rig for silent running. You'll be able to hear the cavitation of the surface ship as it gets close. Use the hydrophone to listen for the target and you'll be able to pick out its direction. Ask the navigator for a depth check and you'll hear the sonar ping. Later in the war, you'll also hear the sonar pings of surface ships looking for you. One neat touch is that when you're in danger, the crew all whisper instead of talking normally. The game interface allows you to choose English or German for the crew voices. Choose German - all the feedback is duplicated in text at the bottom of the screen so you can understand it. Somehow the German voices seem so much less camp and more in-line with the game than the English ones.

Gameplay.
The gameplay is top notch in SH3. You can be as hands-on as you like, or you can delegate. Want to get from A to B? Plot a course and leave the navigator to it. Alternatively take manual control of the engine telegraph and the rudder. Fancy attacking that ship? Calculate all the torpedo data yourself and issue the 'fire' command, or tell your weapons officer to do it. This level of depth (third pun entirely intended) is great. It means you can leave some of the day-to-day operation of the sub to your crew whilst doing more hands-on stuff yourself. There's two threats to your sub - surface ships, and later in the war, the air forces. Air forces can be dealt with only in calm weather when you can man the flak gun. In stormy weather, the crew cannot use the deck guns so you have to dive and evade the bombers.
Surface ships are a different matter entirely. You can torpedo them at any time from the surface or periscope depth, or in calm weather, you can man the artillery gun and start shelling them. In line with the do-it-yourself-or-delegate gameplay, you can either leave the gunnery officers to their own devices, run the gun yourself, or command the watch office where exactly to aim. For example, aim for the command bridge, aim for weapons, or aim for waterline. Aiming for the waterline guarantees a sinking, but if the ship is moving, you might want to aim for the bridge first to take out its controls. Artillery gunning is a pretty simple affair - range, shoot. Range, shoot. Range, shoot. It's also not good for attacking convoys. It works well on unarmed ships, but if you get caught on the surface with a destroyer after you, it will all go downhill really fast.
To the torpedos then. You can either use the deck-mounted UZO or the periscope to sort out a torpedo attack. Depending on the level of difficulty you've selected, you can let the weapons officer calculate the TDC settings, or you can do it yourself. Recommendation : play the game once with low realism first - you'll never master the torpedo data computer first time out. In realistic / manual mode, you'll need to be able to ID the ships from a ship-recognition guide in order to determine their classification. Then you need to measure their bearing from you. Use the periscope marks to estimate the angle subsided between the water and the highest part of the ship. The height is in the ship-recognition guide and basic trigonometry allows you to calculate a range knowing the height and angle. Wrong ship? Then the height is wrong, your calculations are off and the torpedo computer will give you a bum set of settings.

Either way, fire the torpedo and watch either from the periscope, the deck, the TDC map, or the action camera. Hit the target right and you might break its back first time. Cock it up and your torpedo might miss or glance off. You have a very limited number of torpedos - wasting 3 on a C2 Cargo Vessel is not to be recommended. Trust me, I know.
For the purposes of the game, there's a stealth meter on screen in most views. Trot along at full tilt on the surface in broad sunlight and your stealth meter will be bright red within seconds of spotting a convoy. Doing the same thing in silent running at periscope depth and you'll get much much closer. If you do it right, the convoy won't know you're there until the first torpedo is launched. Even the height of the periscope above the water affects how visible you are.

In manual mode, the basic sub controls work very well. They're all point-and-click. You can choose absolute heading or rudder controls. Shallow or deep depth gauge, and absolute speed or engine room telegraph. For example, if you want all ahead flank and to dive the sub, click on "full ahead" on the engine telegraph, and click on the 10-metre mark on the depth gauge. If you want periscope depth, press "P". It's all really easy to get used to.

The various submarine functions only work well when appropriately manned. It's no use sending a fire command to the torpedo room if there's nobody there. The crew-management aspect of the game is pretty simple to get to grips with, but essential in the operation of a tight ship. If you leave people on duty too long, they get tired and dejected and mistakes happen. Give them time off by allocating them to their quarters for rest.

SH3 comes with a good time-compression system. If you were to play the game in realtime, it could take you days just to get from the sub base to a patrol area. Instead you can compress time up to 8x in a realtime view, (like on deck), 32x in a subsystem view (such as crew management) and 1024x in the map view. Fear not though. If your crew hears or spots a target, or you get dangerously close to land, the sim will instantly drop in to realtime mode so you can deal with the situation accordingly.

There's also a map page with some drawing tools so you can measure distances, plot courses, ranges and bearings, and place marks on the map where you find surface contacts. This is extremely useful for plotting the shipping lanes as you find one ship after another. It allows you to steer well clear of known shipping lanes, or mingle in and cause havoc depending on how you feel.

Presuming your mission goes well, and you get back to base, your renown will be adjusted based on performance and you can acquire upgrades for the sub. You can also issue medals to your crew if you think someone did a particularly good job. Medals increase the crew's moral and willingness to stick with you as their commander. I'm currently nurturing Bruno Unterhorst - he's one of my star gunnery officers and has saved our collective asses a couple of times. He's been rewarded appropriately with medals and a promotion. Whilst you could choose to ignore this level of detail/complexity in the game, it's worth paying attention to it. Well-motivated crews work m-u-c-h better.

A mission breakdown
To give you some idea of how this all works together, here's a brief synopsis of the first part of my first mission. It's September 1939. The Allies know little of the u-boat threat. I'm stationed at Kiel and my first patrol is a week away off the west coast of England. I plot the course on the map and we set off. Nothing much happens for a while. We see the odd neutral surface ship in the distance - nothing to worry about. Part way across the North Sea, I give the crew some light relief and moral-boost by giving them turns on the flak gun, aiming for seagulls. Being early in the war, rather than go around the north of Scotland, I decide to shoot the gap and go straight down the English channel. We're on the surface as daybreak comes. The wind has come up and the sea is starting to swell. My Watch officer reports a ship on a bearing of 300 degrees. I pop up on the bridge and take a look with my binoculars. It's an armed trawler flying an English ensign. I call the gunnery crew up on deck and take manual control of the helm. I slow us down to half speed, and turn the nose of the sub towards the target. He's still not seen us. I command the gunnery crew to open up and aim for the weapons first. One shot. Short. Second shot. Long. Third shot, dead-on. The rear gun on the trawler explodes in a spectacular shower of debris. Aim for the waterline! The trawler turns and starts to slalom in an attempt to show a smaller target. The gunnery officers pound the ship with three more rounds and then a lucky shot hits the engine room at the waterline. With an enormous explosion, the trawler breaks in half and starts to sink. Below decks in the sub the sound of a dying ship fills the compartments, hearing the metal twisting and groaning on the way down. First kill.
I instruct the navigator to resume course and he does. The gunnery crew are sent back to their quarters and I rotate some of the other crew who are getting tired. Day becomes night, we putter through the English channel with no more contacts and out towards the Atlantic. We reach the patrol zone and quickly come across a freighter steaming for England. I take control of the helm and aim us for a crossing course. Bugger! The sun is in front of us! My Watch officer tells me we've been spotted. Watching the freighter confirms it - he's started evasive maneuvers. The sea is too high to use the deck guns so I have to take the ship down with torpedos. If I let it go, the word will go out about my patrol (yes, the game is that dynamic). The problem is that he's doing a crazy-ivan all over the surface and I can't get a decent lock on. Instead I dive to periscope depth and parallel his course for half a day. Eventually he returns to a straight course and that gives me the opportunity I need. I turn the sub on to a collision course, flank speed, periscope depth. My sonar man confirms he hasn't changed course - not seen us. I line up firing solution for the torpedos and send one away. The stopwatch is started. Tickticktickticktick....
a minute later and Boooooooom! Disabled the propulsion. He's a sitting duck but didn't sink. All astern! We're closing too quickly! Another firing solution, a second torpedo and the ship lists badly and is on fire. No point in wasting any more torpedos. I surface the u-boat and sit on deck with the watch officer, observing the death throes of the freighter as she churns in the high seas on fire, and eventually rolls over and sinks. Second kill! The problem is that I took too long and the freighter radio'd a message home. Our return through the English channel was dogged by a determined frigate trying to find us. U-boats can only stay on battery power for so long - eventually you have to surface and use the diesel engines to recharge them, as well as venting CO2 and getting fresh air into the sub. Frankly it was nerve-wracking sitting on the bottom, listening to the ship as it passed over us. I can only imagine what will happen next time when there's depth charges.

Bugs
There's one particular bug which is amusing and irritating at the same time. If you get into a sufficiently rough sea, and you're on deck, you can find yourself occasionally submerged as a huge wave passes right over you. I work in the simulation industry and I know how difficult it is to correlate ship motion with wave motion in simulation. Ubisoft have done a great job but you will occasionally see this bug.
It doesn't detract any from the game.

Updates
In the first couple of weeks since the game came out, Ubisoft issued two patches, and a third is on the way. The developers are listening closely to the sub sim community and sorting out problems early. Go to www.subsim.com for more info...