Well where do I begin? I have to admit that even after reading the manual, playing the tutorials and going through a fair few missions I still don’t have much of a clue what I am doing with this, but despite that I am very much enjoying the game.
Silent Hunter 3 (as the name obviously suggests) is the third Silent Hunter game, a game in which you simulate the role of a Submarine captain in World War 2. To be honest though it a refreshing change to find a WW2 game that’s not a RTS or an FPS.
Whilst the game is very deep (no pun intended) and also very much a simulator it tries and succeeds to be very user friendly and accessible to all. The first way it achieves this is in how it looks, for a submarine game it really is, well for want of a better word, sexy. When you get to the fun parts (that’s firing the torpedoes) the game goes all cinematic, you get picture in picture mode of the torpedo making its way towards its target and some great explosions when it gets there. The whole thing is as if Michael Bay remade Das Boot instead of a horror movie.
Everything about the game feels polished. You control the sub in many ways, soon adapting the one that feels better for you, be it keyboard shortcuts, single mouse clicks or a rather nice “virtual cockpit” type mode where you can move around in mouse look and interact with the sub as you see fit. What should be very complex and have a manual the size of a house is not actually that hard to get to grips with and has a manual no bigger than your average FPS or RTS.
The game can also be configured to how you want to play. You can have it as realistic as you choose, so you can either spend your time monitoring and micro-managing everything, or reduce the realism down and play this as an arcade game with everything either being ignored or running itself. You do miss most of the game’s charm in this mode though, and so it’s best to try and have the realism as high as you can.
As mentioned earlier as well the game looks gorgeous. Whilst many have sung the praises of how Far Cry and Half Life 2 pushed forward the graphical boundaries for FPS, Silent Hunter goes even further in terms of a simulation. It’s all very realistic with the inside of the sub seeming rather dark, dirty and claustrophobic, whilst out on deck or through the periscope the seas and vessels are really brought to life. To go with the graphics you also have some great sounding moments and again it all adds to the atmosphere.
This is a rather difficult game to rate and sum up as I have no benchmark, and don’t know if this is better than worse than anything else out there in the Sub-genre. It can be confusing at times and sometimes I felt a little out of my depth (nope, still not intended) but at all times the game was fun, yes you are playing a sim, but you do actually feel like you are “playing”.
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