Gamersmint Review: Silent Hunter 5 – Sleeping with the fishes
It’s hard making a simulation game. Stick to the ultra realistic approach and you alienate newcomers. Try making the game more accessible and you risk angering the small but hardcore fan base that you have built over the years. Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic was always going to be a tough sell with its limited appeal. To those looking forward to this game, all I have to say is…Silent Hunter 4 retails at $8 and is easily a much better game than Silent Hunter 5 will ever be. Stay away from Silent Hunter 5.
And did I mention that Silent Hunter 4 is DRM free? Hurray!
The Gameplay
For the first time in franchise history, Silent Hunter 5 allows you to move in first-person and interact with your crew. You play through the eyes of a German first officer onboard a U-Boat, patrolling the coast of Poland circa 1939. You wake up to the voice of a fellow comrade and are tasked with making your way to the Captain who dramatically tells you that the war has begun and instructs you to blow up a nearby enemy convoy. Straight into the action…that’s how a game should start…with a bang – right? Right? RIGHT?
The game expects you to pick up each and every nuance of controlling a submarine without any proper information or guidance in the tutorial. Even after having played the excellent Silent Hunter 3, I had a tough time figuring out basic things like setting waypoints on the minimap to move the submarine, which in my opinion, is a horrible design choice. I’m the type of gamer who rips open the shrink wrap and gets right into a new game without even so much as glancing at the manual. Silent Hunter 5 forced me to pick up the flimsy manual, which didn’t help one bit, either. One would expect a hardcore simulation like Silent Hunter 5 to have excessive documentation about the workings of the game, but all of that is MIA in this case. The cluttered menu system does not help either. I don’t see how Ubisoft expected newcomers to get past the steep learning curve.
So after 3 hours of frustrating trial and error (Ooooooo, what does this button do – CLICK – oh crap; women and children, women and…KABOOM!), I had most of the important dials and knobs figured out and thought that I could finally enjoy some gritty naval action. To my disappointment, the game was not done and there was a shitstorm brewing on the horizon, which by the way, I had no chance of spotting thanks to the terrible draw distance. I soon realized that that the developer had added a few RPG elements to go hand in hand with the brand new FPS viewpoint. The player as Captain has to make sure that the crew is working in top condition. To do so I was supposed to talk to my crew at regular intervals to boost their morale. While this might sound fine on paper, in truth it is extremely shallow and poorly implemented. The crew seems to have a mind of their own and have more mood swings than a drunken woman during her periods. At one point of time I asked a sad looking man in the engine room about his children and I could swear the talk worsened his mood. Maybe I should have asked him about that night in Berlin when he chugged Beer and nailed the cross eyed hooker, only problem is the game didn’t let me do that.
The foundation of Silent Hunter has always been the intense sea battles. It still holds true over here as there is quite a bit of fun to be had with the game, if you can look past the myriad of flaws, which I will get back to in a minute. Unarguably, there is a sense of excitement as you submerge and stalk an enemy ship for 10 whole minutes before surfacing and unleashing a barrage of torpedoes to sink that sucker. The campaign has been touted as being dynamic but is mostly scripted and takes you down a linear path with strict mission objectives. This does kind of work in the game’s favor as it gives you a sense of purpose and the pretense that there is a huge war going on around you. This game is not meant for those of you with short attention spans. Searching for enemy targets can take a long, long time and even then, setting up a perfect attack is time consuming as well. However, it all pays off when you watch thin white lines tear through the water and culminate in a fantastic ball of fire, as your enemy sink to the bottom of the ocean. You can also surface right in the middle of an enemy convoy, taking them by surprise, and while this may not result in success, it sure as hell is fun.
But fun is something that you will have in the most minute of doses in Silent Hunter 5. Clearly an unfinished product, Silent Hunter is plagued by game breaking bugs. Before a confrontation, the player has to run down the length of the ship shouting orders but there is no guarantee that your crew will abide by them. Even worse are the actual battles that take place. The shoddy enemy A.I. plays a big part in this. At times, you might follow the enemy for several miles and just when you formulate a deadly strike, the enemy ships crash into each other, for no reason at all. While this might be hilarious at first, it quickly becomes a pain as the only good part of the game is taking down the enemy. It’s obvious there isn’t any icing here, but goddamnit, let me have my cake…even if its strawberry (ugh).
Next Page : Gameplay Continued
