Gamersmint Review: Silent Hunter 5 – Sleeping with the fishes
So much in the game happens at random; even veterans may not be able to predict the A.I’s next move. Fairly early-on in the game, on routine patrol missions, when my U-Boat was submerged at great depths, I was somehow being discovered and mothered by the Royal Navy. This was in stark contrast to the attack missions, where a host of enemy ships, huddled together and kept taking hit after hit without realizing that I was around. And then there is the friendly A.I. which is more prone to crashing into you than sinking enemy boats. The movement system in Silent Hunter has you setting waypoints on the minimap and using time compression to speed up things for long distance travel. However, after setting up a perfect route on the minimap and punching the time compression to the highest, the game will surprise you by driving your submarine headfirst into a landmass. This level of unpredictability may somewhat be welcome in other genres, but in something that’s supposed to be ultra realistic, there is no room for randomness. To sum it all up, the infestation of bugs kill any fun there is to be had in Silent Hunter 5. This is a lost cause.
Graphics
The submarine interiors look great and it shows that some painful research has gone into creating the innards of a German U-Boat. Character models and environments are decent though nothing special. The explosions surely pack a punch and the sight of a sinking enemy destroyer is a great reward to the effort you put in to make it happen. When it comes to the water, which is an ever-present theme throughout the whole franchise; this ain’t no Bioshock but the water looks fine.
The screenshots capture the look of the game but not the experience. The game runs at a single digit framerate even on high end cards like an Nvidia GTX 280. This seems to be a major problem during the interior sections when you are strolling inside your U-boat. There is a drastic framerate increase once you take the helm at the periscope but things can get choppy again, once the explosions begin.
Sound
I’ll keep this short. Annoying.
Germans speaking in suspect English accents. Irritating dialogues being repeated every few minutes. Stuttering Audio. Â The only saving grace here is when you dive and all the sounds fade away into oblivion.
DRM and Multiplayer
Ubisoft has received a lot of flak for the usage of DRM copy protection in games like Assassins Creed 2 and the picture is not exactly rosy here. For the uninitiated, all DRM games have to be connected online to be playable. If you get disconnected, you are booted back to main screen and you lose any progress that you did not save. While I did not come across many disconnects, I did have a hard time every time I saved or loaded a game. You see; all save games have to be synced with the Ubisoft master server and this means that every time I save a game, the information is sent to the server and stored there. To make matters intolerable, loading takes ages as the game tries to gather information about the save file. This means more waiting if you have more save files. Hogwash!
There’s not a lot to be said about the multiplayer component of the game, mainly because it does not work. After 3 days of repeatedly trying to find a game, I gave up on the idea of checking out the multiplayer suite. While I cannot give any views on the multiplayer, I don’t see it being a life-changing experience.
Next Page : Final Thoughts and scoring
