Silent Hunter II

The Good
I love submarine games.

The Bad
I don't like this submarine game.

"Silent Hunter II" is just a really, really paltry game. There's nothing overtly WRONG with it - at least it isn't buggy, like most games - but there's just not much right with it. Frankly, it's not nearly the game Silent Hunter was.

First off, the game is technically very primitive. The graphics are appalling; I'm no graphics nut and I know SSI doesn't make games for their looks, but teenagers could have done better graphics than this. This is a 2001 release, and the graphics are 1994-1995 quality at best, they're choppy, and they make the game hard. The sound isn't substantially better.

Secondly, the gameplay is shallow, shallow, shallow. There's nothing more to running your submarine in this game than there was in 1995. I'll grant that WWII U-Boats were not technical marvels like a modern submarine, but driving this thing is about as complex as driving the Cobra in "Carmageddon." It's not THIS easy to pilot a big boat. There's no advanced control options at all, nor is submarine captaincy given any depth - you have no options in terms of outfitting your boat, there's no crew management of any kind, etc. etc.

Third: Nor is there any sort of free-ranging campaign option. Missions are linear and preset. That's more suited to the environment (German U-boat commanders did not have quite the freedom you could give the player in the original Silent Hunter, where you captained an American sub in the Pacific) but it takes away from the appeal of the campaign game. Since you don't have a crew to manage, there's no particular connection between any of the missions, no feel that you're managing a captain through the whole war. It sort of bites, actually.

Fourth, the gameplay itself is no hot shakes. Poor graphics take away much of the fun of looking for targets (and much of the realism; in World War II, submarines had to find their targets and threats visually, for the most part) and the AI is as dumb as a football bat.

The Bottom Line
Bleah. If you want a good submarine game, buy the original Silent Hunter, or buy Silent Service II or something. This game isn't worth the new-game price.

The Good
There are a lot of things to like about SHII. The graphics are fairly good, if not excellent, the sounds are better than average, and most of the simulation engine seems to work pretty well. If a destroyer sees you and comes to get you, I think you'll be as impressed as I was about how good they are at their jobs.

In general the "whole idea" of tracking down a convoy and then trying to execute your attack without getting blasted seems very well done. And that's what a sub game is all about. So in that respect I have to give this game very high marks.

Frankly I can't understand Rick's review... bad graphics and sound, not buggy? Was he playing the same game?

The Bad
The problem I have is a lack of technical depth. It's like the authors "kinda" understood what they were doing, but didn't really. I see this a lot, so it's not too surprising.

One perfect example is the Type III torpedo, the German's fancy homing torp that let them take on the destroyers in a snapshot situation. The manual tells you how they work, except that they don't in the game. That's right, they simply don't home. They run in a nice straight line 5 feet in front of the bow and you miss, so sorry. Actually none of the torps seem quite right -- another thing the torps had magnetic fuses that let them trigger in a near-miss, but that doesn't work either.

Then there's they way that the enemy ships can shoot at you in fog, while you cannot do the same in return. And the way the weather is the same over the entire atlantic for an entire mission. Then there's the mission bugs, I spend days running the north sea gauntlet to return to base at Willemshaven like the mission brief said, only to see that the home base was actually Lorient in another screen. Damage control consists of getting more and more damaged until you die. No really, there's a little meter in the damage control screen, and when it reaches zero, mission over. Or the way the first few missions are very detailed and reasonably easy to figure out, whereas the later missions drop you far from the action, give you useless information, and you basically have to try over and over to figure out what you're supposed to do.

The whole game is like this. Some portions are very well done up to a point, and then the dull edge comes through.

And finally there's the UI, which changes from screen to screen. For instance in most screens a right-click will put you in the"move this thing around" mode so you can quickly turn the periscope or AA gun. Ahhh, but that doesn't work for the main gun. Why?

Generally the game seems to suffer from V2 problems -- the authors were apparently copying the older game without really understanding what they were doing.

The Bottom Line
It's pretty good in most ways, and I have had a few missions where I had a death grip on the mouse, but the bugs and general lack of depth is distracting.