Silent Hunter III

"Repetitive, but fun, engaging, and challeging!"

So I'm in the middle of my 21st war patrol in my third Silent Hunter III campaign (SH3 hereafter) when the game crashes... HARD. Down it goes, taking with it about 18000 tons of merchant shipping that I'd so far managed to eke out during that patrol. Of course, during that particular patrol, I hadn't been following the Prime Directive of Gaming ("Save early... save often.") so I have to start that patrol over again. That's when it occurs to me that I don't want to. When did commanding a German U-Boat during WWII become my *job*?

First, a bit of background: I was a Silent Hunter II fanatic. I disappeared into that game for weeks! I was so into that game that I spent $50 on the game, but $250 on books related to WWII (including Winston Churchill's "The Second World War"), and days of my life on-line researching the topic. Granted, that game had flaws -- flaws big enough to drive merchant convoy through. The two biggest problems, from my view, were lack of atmosphere and the static campaign and its tonnage minimums per mission. But since it was the only decent submarine simulator, it really was the only game in town.

The sequel arrived and I purchased it immediately, ready to immerse myself (hah!) in the experience. As it turns out, despite some flaws, this one's been well worth the money!

Gameplay: 8/10

Good stuff! The basics of a submarine simulation are of course finding a target, your approach to the target, and then the sinking of that target. Here, SH3 gets it right in virtually every respect. Just like in real life, finding a merchant ship is hard! I consider myself very skilled at the detection and approach phases -- I can do the math needed for an intercept in my head in 10 or 12 seconds at most -- and even so, there were many times that my target and I passed within 10km of each other without my even being able to set up an attack. Weather was usually the determining factor here: heavy weather makes visual tracking of targets nearly impossible and hydrophone tracking of targets nearly as difficult. In heavy rain, your visibility drops to a mere 350 meters... and since your torpedoes need 300 meters just to arm, it's often not even worth the trouble to try to track down your targets in such weather.

Problem is, targets are so hard to detect that you might push a bad approach on a target you HAVE detected just so that you can go home from a patrol with a sinking or two. ;-)

Even without weather to use an excuse, your hydrophone operator can only detect targets within about 20km of you. If you rely on visual detection of targets, your lookouts will only find targets within about 7km. That means being lucky enough or smart enough to get yourself within those ranges. Here, an understanding of the U-Boat war will be your friend: park yourself on the common convoy routes or the shipping lanes and more often than not, the targets will come to you. Do a little research! Learn where the actual U-Boat commanders got most of their sinkings. Or, if you play on a lower difficulty level, from time to time, you will receive reports of nearby targets or convoys in your area.

Once you detect a target, getting into attack position is your next challenge. Fortunately, the game includes time compression to make this part a bit less tedious. After that, you have to decide on a surface attack or a periscope attack. If you choose a surface attack, you risk detection by the target, which will cause it to zig-zag -- making your shot much harder -- attack you, or both. Just like in the real war, the larger merchant ships are often armed and though the skill of merchant seamen is limited, it doesn't take many hits to drive you under the surface.

Eventually, you will sink a target -- watching it break up, flood, or tip over is often the fun part -- and from then on, you'll be addicted. The more skillfully you place your torpedoes, the fewer you will need to sink a target. Achieve the Holy Grail of a back-breaking under-the-keel shot, and even the largest targets will break in half and sink in only a couple of minutes with only a single torpedo shot.

Get detected, though, and destroyers will come after you, trawlers and torpedo boats will harass you, or merchant ships will scream for help, try to ram you, or attack you with their poor guns (if they have them). There's nothing more off-putting than waiting on the surface for a merchie to finally sink after being torpedoed when the destroyer it called in from a nearby port arrives to drive you off. If a destroyer gets a bead on you, an annoyance can become downright dangerous: depth charges start coming down and if you've chosen a place for your attack with no deep water to escape into, your life may turn out to be interesting and short. Airplanes can also detect and destroy a U-Boat, particularly later in the war when they become terrifyingly skilled at it.

All of this is played out in a number of 3D modelled environments, notably the U-Boat's command room and the conning tower (when you're on the surface). Go topside in heavy weather and the screen rocks back and forth in an almost nausea-inducing manner and you can almost feel the rain. Take a depth charge attack at close range and the command room becomes chaos -- the lights go out, the display rocks alarmingly, and if you get hit hard enough, leaks appear. There are also a number of 2D screens, notably the overhead map view -- you'll spend a lot of time here -- the Torpedo Data Computer screen, and the Crew Management screen.

Crew management is a big part of the game: from time to time, you'll want to look in on your crew, rotate out tired ones to their quarters, assign specialists from each department to key areas -- or choose not to and save them for a more important occasion later -- and use your officers to prompt maximum effort. When you return to port, you are given the opportunity to promote, decorate, and train your crew and by 1943 or so, you should have a crack crew which will greatly increase your chances of success (or at least, survival, by that time).

The game includes a "Realism" setting that ranges from 0% (arcade-like submarine shoot-em-up) to 100% (in which you manually have to do everything from target identification to attack geometry). Most players will be happiest between 40% and 60%. One piece of advice: if you elect for automatic weapons targeting, once the TDC has done its work, turn off automatic targeting long enough to adjust the gyro angle to put the torpedo a degree or so "ahead" of where the computer thinks the torpedo should go, particularly when using T1 torpedoes. Targets always evade first by pushing their engines to full power and if you stick with the automatic settings, you will forever be hitting targets at the stern instead of the mid-point.

There are a few off notes. Crew management can quickly turn into micro-management, the last thing you want to be messing with in a pitched battle. Time compression is a great time-saver, but maddeningly, it doesn't work within a certain distance of land, which means that every time you leave Lorient channel (for instance), you have to do it in real time, which takes at least 12 minutes per patrol. Time compression at the highest rate also introduces major frame-rate issues as the game calculates the positions of every single ship in the entire world (no, I'm *not* kidding; this was confirmed by the developers). Your deck gun is a great way to take out an isolated unarmed target or finish off one that isn't worth another torpedo... except the game won't let you use the deck gun if there's even the slightest trace of wave motion. Even worse, even though your flak guns are placed on the upper conning tower, the game won't let you use those if there's any wave motion at all, either...

Worst of all, though the weather effects look absolutely superb, the game's developers are so in love with them that you will spend the majority of your time in the game experiencing them. I spent the month of July 1941 in one campaign parked with engines off near the south coast of France in the Mediterranean to confirm this for myself: of the 31 days in July, 14 of them were in stormy weather and 7 more were in wave action sufficient to make using guns impossible. I doubt very much that this is the case in real life. Even in late summer in the mid-Atlantic, it is possible to experience several consecutive days of gale force winds, rain, lightning, et cetera. And if you choose to brave the North Sea in winter, you probably won't experience anything *but* heavy weather. It's maddening.

Graphics: 8/10

Here's where the money went. The ship, sub, and airplane models are great, and the water effects are even better. Weather is realistically modelled and as I mentioned looks gorgeous. Enemy ships swim out of heavy fog and if you've been stalking one under these conditions, you can very easily ram one before you see it -- it happened to me once and soon nets you a smashed U-Boat and a badly crippled crew.

The 3D models for a variety of areas are featured, and some are easier to get to than others. In general, try double-clicking on everything, particularly when your mouse pointer turns red. Lots of locations open up into lots of other locations that you can explore, particularly during that boring 12-minute trip through the Lorient channel. As I mentioned, in weather, the 3D environments sway, and when you're under attack, they rock, lights flicker or go out, leaks spring up, and the 3D character models react. When you are standing next to the watch officer in the conning tower and happen to be there when he spots a ship, you'll see his mouth move realistically as he tells you about it. The one nit is the repetition of the same controls and gauges all over the ship.

The 2D displays aren't quite as impressive, particularly given all of the time that you're going to spend staring at them. Crew management, in particular, can become tedious because the controls for moving crew around are not intuitive (other than picking up one person at a time to shift them around). The damage screens in SH2 were much better than this and gave you a real feel for damage (as well as additional atmosphere since they looked like paper). In SH3, this or that portion of the ship turns yellow or red, you assign a damage control party to work there, and eventually the yellow or red goes away. Annoyingly, you get only *one* damage control party to assign crew to and so can work on only one thing at a time.

SH2 was notorious for convoy ships and their escorts colliding into each other, and this has been solved in SH3, though with some amusing effects. At one point in a campaign, I had been detected by a destroyer while moving among convoy ships. I slipped behind a large tanker to attempt to give this destroyer the slip (and truth be told, try to goad him into a collision). He would not be goaded. The scream of his engines overhead announced the destroyer doing a full reverse to avoid the collision, and then it was left motionless for several minutes while the tanker crossed its path. Good stuff. Even better, amusingly, the tanker moving across its path gave me time to swing around and sink the motionless destroyer with an aft tube shot. ;-)

There are other amusing touches: on the TDC and map displays, the graphics give the feel of paper on which things have been written: there are noticeable pencil marks, creases, water stains, et cetera. Crew can be assigned ranks and medals, and these show up on both the Crew Management panel and on the 3D models of each crewman when you encounter them in the places you can go. There's rust on the conning tower, a German oom-pah band playing the German national anthem when you leave port, girls throwing roses into the water... and in one location, I spotted a fisherman working off a pier.

Visually, the best part of the game is a free-roaming camera that you can position where you want and move around with cursor keys and the mouse. Although this camera gives you ample opportunities to cheat at low realism levels by watching what's going on above you, or looking for gaps in a destroyer screen around a convoy, it also provides some of the game's most breathtaking visuals. I was once sunk one night in the eastern English Channel simply because I was mesmerized, watching the fingers of searchlights sweeping the water, looking for periscopes and watching depth charges fall from overhead destroyers. Each military ship has a visible crew who can be observed doing their jobs. The free-roaming camera can be turned off at higher realism levels. There's also a similar "event camera" through which you can watch nearby ships sink when they are sufficiently damaged. Again, this event camera is turned off at higher realism levels.

When ships take damage, they are *shown* taking damage. Land a gunshot on the crowded deck of a freighter, and crates explode into the air, catching fire. Open up with your 20mm cannon on a nearby Elco torpedo boat and not only can you sink it, but a skilled shot into its magazines will cause a secondary explosion that will kill it. Hit a ship with a under-the-keel shot and it's shown breaking in half. Hit a destroyer with a stern shot and the stern will sink, causing the bow to rise into the air, bob on the surface for a while, and finally sink.

The huge drawback that will be off-putting to a lot of people is that there's one choice for screen resolution: 1024x768. SH2 also had this problem (supporting only 800x600). This choice seems ridiculously primitive, and I wish the developers would hire an art staff. There's just no excuse for not offering a range of screen resolutions at that at least include 1280x1024, particularly in 2005.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention one amusing thing I noted: there isn't a single swastika to be found in the entire game. Every time you encounter a location -- a medal, for instance -- where a swastika would normally be found, it's been replaced with an blank amber-and-white circle. ;-)

Sound: 9/10

Very nice! The sound adds to the overall ambiance of the game. The hull creaks, ships explode, deck and flak guns fire, and the sound of depth charges dropping into the water nearby is every bit as unnerving as you expect it to be. Add to this realistic thunder, rain, and ship collision noises, plus crew responses to orders. Order the ship to rig for silent running and you can hear it happening... the crew even starts to whisper their responses to your orders! There's also a ship-borne "gramophone" through which you can play MP3s, and a number of libraries of WWII-era music (not included, but easily found at subsim.com) will add to the atmosphere.

If you're being hunted by destroyers, their pings will echo off your hull, you'll hear them pass overhead when it happens, and the game supports multiple speaker channels so that a destroyer that passes from right to left ahead of you will sound like it's passing right to left ahead of you.

Failing the gramophone, the game's music fits each circumstance but is otherwise forgettable, other than the German national anthem I mentioned above. The last thing you'll be thinking of when you're being depth-charged is the fact that the music fits the mood for the occasion. ;-)

Other than this, there isn't a whole lot to say.

Story: 6/10

The Germans lose.

::grins::

Seriously, there is no story to speak of. There are three single-player modes you can play the game in: campaign, missions, and mission editor. The mission editor allows you to set your own conditions for the game: number of ships, their configuration, movement, escorts, submarines, et cetera. That leaves single missions -- 10 of them plus others you'll be able to download -- and the campaign. The single missions allow you to play out key U-Boat battles: particular convoy battles, Gunther Prien's attack on Scapa Flow, the use of a Type XXI "Electro-Boat", several others. Each one of the single missions is fun and has its own challenges. Those who played Silent Hunter II will find these missions very familiar: they're essentially what was included in that game's campaign, though blessedly lacking in that game's tonnage requirements.

The missions are great fun! Whether you're trying to match Gunther Prien's exploits in Scapa Flow or take a Type XXI into what feels like the heart of the British Navy, your heart-rate will get moving, trust me. The latter mission is especially fun -- my best performance is both fleet carriers, the escort carrier, a cruiser, and three destroyers ;-) -- but all of them have their amusements.

That leaves the SH3 "campaign"... which honestly... kind of struggles. Let me be the very first to say that I was one of the many people who decried the SH2 campaign and its tonnage requirements. In real life, many U-Boats went home after a patrol with no sinkings, and SH2 should have just accepted whatever effort you turned in and let you go on with the other missions. SH3 "solves" this by sending you out on patrols and then rewarding you for your work in the form of rewards for your crew, promotions, medals, and "renown points" which you can spend on submarine upgrades or more powerful subs.

While this system works, it turns being a U-Boat commander into a job. Your orders are always to head for a specific location on the map (earning you 500 renown points), patrol that location for 24 hours (earning you 200 renown points), and then return to base (earning you 100 renown points). Sinkings then earn you additional renown, unless they are neutrals or friendlies, in which case you lose renown. Your renown is adjusted based on the realism level that you play. Medals and promotions are assigned based on your success and timetables known to the game. You are never assigned "special missions" -- the game never "talks" to you at all, in fact. Each mission is exactly the same: go out, patrol, come back. Find a merchie, approach by stealth, sink it, repeat. Over and over again. For an average 8 war patrols a year from September 1939 until May 1945 (when the war *always* ends), until you are killed (if you don't go back to a prior save game), or until you give up at the sheer futility of it.

This is what I meant about the game becoming about your job as a U-Boat commander. Every war patrol is the same in that it comes down to sinkings. Every sinking is the same in that it comes down to detection, approach, and targeting. Before a single campaign is over, you'll have completed 45 or so war patrols with quite possibly as many as five or six sinkings average per patrol... 250 sinkings or more total if you have some skill. There's some variation in terms of which U-Boat you use, the weather, your location, a surface or a submerged attack, what escort the target has, whether it's part of a convoy or alone... but the game pretty rapidly becomes repetitive.

What's missing from this game is *context*. An example will show off what I mean. In one campaign with realism set to 100%, on an afternoon in May 1941, I came across a large convoy off the Iceland coast in surprisingly good weather being escorted by a single destroyer. As I was running a little short of torpedoes but had a full complement of deck gun shells, I made the somewhat daring choice to go after the destroyer. After a stalk of an hour or so and using the last of my torpedoes, I killed the destroyer and sent it to the bottom. I then surfaced to find 16 merchant ships in the convoy: 12 British (with 4 heavy cargo ships and 2 tankers) and 4 American. One of the heavy British merchants had a deck gun and I went after this one first with my own deck gun... then sank the eleven other British merchantmen in turn. By sunset, all of them were destroyed or sinking. As it was May 1941, I left the American ships alone. I realized even as I was exulting over this victory that I could play the game for a thousand hours and probably never score that strong a win again: 68,000 tons of merchant shipping destroyed in a two hour period. I know from historical context that had Churchill suffered a defeat like that in May 1941, his government might have fallen. I had achieved a Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Crossed Swords in the previous patrol and was a Senior Lieutenant. I returned my boat to base to discover... nothing. No promotion. No new medals. Granted, my renown score for that patrol was gratifying, as was the variety of medals that I had to give to my crew, but this was the sort of victory that would have meant parades, an audience with der Fuhrer, humiliating headlines in British papers... et cetera. But as far as SH3 was concerned, it was just another war patrol, and apparently not even one worthy of promotion to Captain-Lieutenant, given that I apparently hadn't yet met the timeline requirement for such a promotion. I kept thinking of Wing Commander III, where it's possible to change the results of the end mission cinematics based on your success or failure. And that game was released nearly 10 years ago! Nope, that campaign ended in May 1945.

Overall: 8/10

Overall, Silent Hunter III is both a worthy successor to SH2 and a worthy submarine simulation. There are definite problems with replayability and repetitiveness, but those problems will not stop you from getting at least 50 or 60 hours of gameplay out of this one, not even counting the multi-player component. I do wish there were a couple of other submarine simulators so as to give SSI some competition in this space. Even without competition though, if you enjoy a good naval sim, you should definitely pick this one up. I recommend it!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/27/05