Ubisoft finally moves their premiere sub sim to the Pacific.
Two years ago, Ubisoft renewed our faith in the simulation genre with an absolutely first-class submarine sim called Silent Hunter III. Focusing on the North Atlantic-based shenanigans of Germany's U-boats, it managed to balance a high level of realism with a surprisingly high level of accessibility. Better yet, it did all this within the context of brilliant graphics and a phenomenally engaging campaign. Now the designers have taken the same ideas and used them to treat submarine warfare in the Pacific. The resulting title, Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific, is every bit as good as the previous game. Though it's not without its problems, it's a sure bet for fans of undersea action.
The submarine commander has a number of tasks before him. Not only is he in charge of setting the overall route of patrol, but he also has to consider how and where to attack the enemy and how to get out of danger once before he's discovered. Maintaining the element of surprise and using your weapons to their greatest effectiveness constitute the most thrilling portions of the game. Lengthy journeys between targets is a considerably less dramatic but no less important part of the job.
After taking on a series of short tutorials that get you up and running with the main systems on your submarine, you'll be prepared to take on the enemy in the campaign or in a number of solo missions. But while the game outlines the basics of firing torpedoes or manning the AA guns, players who want to know more about the more sim-heavy options of plotting firing solutions will have to seek the information on their own.
In any case, the focus here isn't on protractors and stopwatches. The real point of the game is to put you in the shoes of a sub commander and force you to make the decisions about how you're going to engage the enemy rather than how to operate each individual station. Sure, those elements are present for players who want to enjoy them, but Wolves of the Pacific is more about the experience of being a sub commander than it is about the nuts and bolts of submarine operation.
It's a fact that submarines are the predatory bullies of the sea, taking on defenseless merchants and tankers (or god help them, even sampans), while running from fights with tougher opponents like destroyers and cruisers. Still, the wily submarine captain can sometimes seize an opportunity to take out a much stronger target, like a carrier or a battleship. The trouble is, these guys never travel without serious backup and you can quickly find yourself outnumbered. The AI here is just as aggressive as it was in Silent Hunter III, so if you bite off more than you can chew, you'll quickly be surrounded by depth charges and dive bombers.
As you progress through the campaign, you'll earn renown that you can trade in for upgrades to your existing detection equipment or for newer weapons. Whether you go with a stronger deck gun or a better air radar is going to depend on how you approach the game. Eventually you'll be able to move up from the lowly starter submarines to get more advanced models that have better performance and more torpedo tubes. Submarine history buffs will definitely appreciate the differences between a Porpoise and a Balao class, or between the lowly Mk 14 torpedoes and the fancier Mk 18s but, for gamers who don't already have an understanding of how and why these things are different, the in-game documentation offers absolutely no help.
As with the previous game, there's a wide range of realism options here that you can use to tailor the experience to your liking. Gamers who are looking for a more action-oriented approach can work without fuel limits, slow reload times, torpedo duds or any number of other common restrictions. Gamers who want the hardcore experience will want to turn off options for external camera views and plot their own firing solutions. What's great is that the game offers gamers the chance to set each of these options separately so you can set the realism and difficulty exactly the way you want it.
Waves crash across the bow of your ship and the surface of the sea reflects moonlight and fire. Sea water pools on the lens of your periscopes and even smears the external camera for a bit as you come up from underneath the ocean. Torpedo hits send huge geysers shooting up into the air. The only aspect of the water model that's not completely believable is that the game seems to use a flat plane to determine splashes for shell impacts. You can frequently see splashes occurring above the trough of a wave. In all, it's a really tiny thing that only stands out because everything else is rendered so wonderfully.
Though there aren't the huge deformations from torpedo hits that we were hoping to see, the game seems to have a better damage model than we saw in Silent Hunter III. Different parts of ships still respond differently to weapon fire, but not so much that we can see much more specific visual representations of damage. It's gratifying to get close enough to see the holes you've punched into an enemy hull. Even better, you can sometimes even see sea water filling the space inside. When you get ships to actually explode in gouts of smoke and flame, it's a real treat.
Ships and ports are all wonderfully detailed. Ships have rust stains and rivets that you can only appreciate up close and there's a very realistic sheen to the metal surfaces. There's just as much detail present inside the ships. Your own crewmembers man the appropriate stations and go through the motions of the tasks before them. In port, you'll see all manner of cranes, warehouses, smokestacks, water towers and such. Unfortunately, most of the ports are rather lifeless and deserted. A little activity and a few crowds would definitely help the illusion here.
The sound effects definitely help to maintain the illusion. The creaking of your submarine's hull and the susurration of the sea provides a constant backdrop to the action. Weapons fire and impact sounds have a real sense of weight and convey the right amount of destructiveness. Voiced crew dialogue also adds to the sense of realism here but it has the added benefit of actually giving you information that you need about the world around you.
But it's not all good of course. Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific still suffers from some obvious shortcomings, some of which are an intentional part of the design, some of which are the usual bugs that accompany these types of games. In addition to the regular crash bugs, we've seen every member of the crew fall asleep all at once and been unable to end our patrols because our home port was taken by the enemy. (Even stranger, the ships outside of this enemy port were all friendly.)
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Ubisoft's latest Silent Hunter submarine sim is both fantastic and frustrating.
If you like naval sims, you've probably been waiting for this one. Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific, unofficially known as Silent Hunter IV, will knock your socks off with some of the finest visuals you've ever seen in a sim. It's the stuff you'd expect, such as roiling water, atmospheric lighting, spectacular explosions, and detailed ships that break in half and leave debris and survivors bobbing in the water. Delight to the exquisite wet steel and rust textures. Thrill to the stately prow of your Gato thrusting up from the deep, followed by its proud, erect conning tower. It's sub porn at its finest.
But it's not just about the money shots. You also get the little touches, like gulls flapping around cargo ships, your boat gently rocking when you're inside the command center, and water on the lens of the periscope. This is a game about thoroughly and lovingly presenting the experience of being a submariner. Sadly, for everything Wolves of the Pacific does right, a lot of it sinks under the weight of too many bugs and an interface that's needlessly impossible to figure out.
Taking a Dive
Many of the incidentals of Silent Hunter III, also created by Ubisoft Romania, are carried over from that game's Atlantic setting to this game's Pacific theater. This time, you're in charge of an American submarine hunting Japanese shipping, dodging among the archipelagos in a grand game of cat and mouse, but with dogs and hawks (i.e. destroyers and airplanes) guarding the mice.
Dynamic campaigns in submarine sims are as old as PC gaming itself, and this one offers the latest and arguably best. Radio traffic keeps you informed not just of local sighting, but also the historical events of the war. Your orders guide you through a series of objectives that range from "Hang out here and sink any bad guys you see" to "Go to this very specific place and take a recon photo." Watch out for planes, avoid damage, and carefully husband your precious torpedoes. Oh, and be sure to watch your fuel level.
Along the way, a sophisticated crew management screen tracks experience, skill, and fatigue. You can even give your men promotions. Between sorties you can spend the renown you've earned (similar to experience points) to upgrade your sub's components or even trade up for a better boat. The dynamic campaign offers variety, challenge, and a superlative sense of personal investment.
If you want something quicker and less invested than a full campaign, there are also single patrols, canned missions, and even multiplayer games. The multiplayer support is admirable, but impractical. There's an option to play adversarial games, but the player controlling the Japanese destroyers has the unenviable task of shuffling around a bunch of ships with what looks like a placeholder interface. The player controlling the submarine gets to creep around underwater with no option for time compression. Co-op games are slightly more interesting with all players in submarines trying to get through a destroyer screen. But again, the lack of time compression means this will be too tedious for all but the most dedicated sim heads.
Control of your sub is presented from the perspective of the captain visiting various stations. Nearly every bit of the interface lets you click a mouse button to freely look around in a 3D environment, often with crew members standing around looking slightly zombie-fied (then again, you probably would too if you spent weeks at a time underwater in a little tube). The free camera is particularly rewarding in the external views, where the sub porn aspect is at its most lurid and lovely.
Unfortunately, a lot of the command interface relies on rows of buttons along the bottom of the screen, with only one row accessible at a time. It's almost like playing an MMO, but there's no easy way to move among the taskbars, and most of the buttons have no corresponding hotkey. Then there are the terrible attempts at 3D control panels for the sonar and radar stations. On the whole, the game leans on a mouse-intensive interface that doesn't fit well with the interactive 3D views.
And as you're realizing this, this is where Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific starts to fall apart. Clearly, you're the decider in terms of how deep to go, which direction to head, and when to launch that torpedo. But the wonderful graphics and complex dynamic campaign don't matter one whit when you can't even figure out what that sonar screen is supposed to mean, whether now is a good time to launch that torpedo, or why the game suddenly ended because you sank. This is one of those user-unfriendly hardcore sims that can't be bothered to meet players halfway, much less help the more dedicated among us learn the ropes.
The manual is a travesty, crammed with pages of ship pictures instead of helpful information. There's always the tutorial. Oh, wait, no there isn't. A handful of missions with laconic intros let you practice some aspects of the game, but you're still on your own in terms of figuring out what's what. Feel free to turn down the realism settings as you're learning, but don't expect it to make much difference. You'll still suffer plenty of baffling instant deaths, crew fatigue issues, misfired torpedoes, and poorly understood features. That's a pretty cool interactive protractor on the navigation map and those dials on the attack periscope sure do look cool. Maybe next time Ubisoft can help players use them.
As it is, figuring out how to play Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific is an exercise in extensive trial and error, combined with copious forum trawling. Which is a shame, because with a more helpful and patient approach, this would be an ideal game to introduce casual players to the excitement, tension, and relative simplicity of historical submarine combat. There's a reason there are more movies about submarines than there are about jets with hi-tech avionics. This is a visceral and straightforward type of warfare, with dramatic turns of fortune and an exciting hunter/hunted dynamic. Maybe in Silent Hunter V, Ubisoft will finally understand that and make this series as accessible as it should be.
Of course, the first order of business should be making the game more stable. Although you can save at any time, there's nothing quite so discouraging as losing a meticulously earned kill because you got caught up in the moment and couldn't be bothered to hit escape and click the "save game" button. That's simply not part of the Silent Hunter experience (or at least it shouldn't be). But until Ubisoft gets around to smoothing out the game engine, you should probably make it a part of your Silent Hunter experience. You'll learn the hard way after the unforgettable sound of "'Torpedo impact! Torpedo impact! Torpedo im--.' Silent Hunter IV has encountered a problem and needs to close."
There's a definite lack of polish and far too many bugs, even a couple of patches and a month after its release. On one hand, since hardcore sims are so few and far between, we should be thankful for what we get. But on the other hand, how many shortcuts should we overlook out of sheer gratitude? There's no denying that there's some wonderful work here, and it's a shame that it's so inaccessible and uneven. But even for those of us who are inclined to stick with it, Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific is a profoundly frustrating experience, in large part because of how close it is to being sublime.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved