Sub Command

"Sub-Standard (dodges various flying objects)"

The modern nuclear submarine. Silently it sails beneath the waves, capable of unleashing a devastating attack against its enemy and then quietly sneaking back into the murky depths from whence it came. Few PC submarine simulations have tackled this particular area, save for titles like Tom Clancy's SSN or Jane's 688(i) Hunter/Killer. Sub Command is a "sequel" of sorts to the latter title, developed by Sonalysts Combat Simulations, a company known for providing simulation software to the REAL navy. But despite being flawless from a technical simulation standpoint, Sub Command fails so utterly as a game that I'd have a hard time believing that anyone but the most devoted of sub-sim enthusiasts could derive any enjoyment from it.

Instead of just one sub, Sub Command goes out of its way to give you a choice of three nuclear-powered death machines to command: The hi-tech American Seawolf class sub, the standby 688i Los Angeles class sub, and most interesting of all, the Russian Akula class sub. In terms of difficulty, these three subs could have easily been named Easy, Medium, and Hard. The Seawolf, with all its modern gadgetry and huge amount of weapons is the best choice for those new to the game, the Los Angeles is somewhat less capable, and the Akula is for experienced players only, totally lacking in the high-tech computer and weapon systems of the American subs. Three subs to master, and the ability to play on both sides of the Cold War. Sounds like heaven to the average simmer, right?

It's too bad that the developers failed to realize that one of the key ingredients to a successful sim is immersion. You can build a simulation that's as a accurate as the real thing and then some, but if it doesn't pull the player into the world and make them feel as if they're a part of what's happening, then all the developers efforts have been for naught. Sub Command feels like a training simulation for those in the navy; designed to familiarize people with equipment and procedures and nothing more. It's bland, sterile, listless, and ultimately, totally uninvolving. The result is that commanding a modern nuclear submarine feels more like a day at the office than being at helm at silent, heavily armed killer.

The game is not one that anyone can just pick up and get into right at the start. Before you go blasting ships and subs with reckless abandon, you have to learn to how to properly engage the enemy. Finding a ship means listening with your passive sonar, the "ears" of your sub that will be your primary method of detecting contacts. Once you've detected a contact, there's the small matter of identifying it, making sure that that Kirov-class battlecruiser you've got in your sights isn't really the Exxon Valdez. Assuming the contact is hostile, you must then go to the TMA (target motion analysis) station to develop a firing solution, that is, the targets range, bearing, heading, and speed, before sending a torpedo or two their way. Naturally, obtaining such information takes time, although Sub Command will allow you to designate AI "autocrew" to perform tasks like sonar and TMA for you. Unfortunately, rather menial tasks like prepping torpedo tubes for firing cannot be assigned to the autocrew, and to make matters worse, the autocrew isn't even that good at things it's supposed to do. I distinctly remember one mission where my sub passed within 400 feet of a supertanker, yet my crew couldn't even classify it as a surface or sub-surface contact. Fire control would often set the range-to-engage (the distance at which a torpedo switches on its sonar and begins hunting for its target) of my torpedoes to 10,000 yards for 4000 yard target, and wouldn't let me change it. Given how utterly inept the autocrew is, if you want to get anywhere in Sub Command, you've got to wear every hat on the boat. I can definitely see how some simmers might find this appealing, but in real life the captain of submarine would never do all of this himself. Sometimes I just like to sit back and let my crew handle the petty details while I evade the enemies and get the boat in position.

Then there's the issue of realism. While things like ocean phenomenon and sonar modelling might be accurately modelled, other areas like damage modelling are sorely lacking. Why is it that it takes around 2 or 3 Mk. 48 torpedoes to sink a destroyer every time, when in real life a single Mk. 48 can break a ship in two? (as actually shown in Sub Command's intro video?) There's no locational damage, no "critical hits", and no modelling of damage to individual components. Your own sub's damage is simply represented by a percentage meter, which will most often be either 100% (feelin' fine) or 0% (dead). The problem arises from the fact that Sub Command's simulation engine is derived from the Fleet Command engine, which as any simmer will tell you, certainly wasn't Harpoon in terms of realism.

That's not all that's wrong with Sub Command. Right from the start, Sub Command hurls a big load of ugly at you. As I mentioned earlier, it's based off the Fleet Command engine, which itself wasn't very pretty when it was released back in 1999. Sub Command's graphics do the game absolutely no favors. Water is nothing but a repetitively undulating mass of light blue, the shoreline is a blocky mess of pixels, and ships are chunky, low-polygon boxes with ugly, low-resolution textures to boot. Explosions are nothing but poorly-drawn canned animations, and the game can't seem to drawn splashes, smoke, and fire over top one another without causing hideous graphical glitches. Things improve somewhat once you get underwater, where the lack of visibility hides the worst of the graphics, but Sub Command is still a very visually unappealing title. There is the (somewhat justified) argument that since submarine warfare often takes place without ever seeing the enemy, that graphics aren't important. But when the "sim" is so visually unappealing it pulls me right out of the game, something's wrong. In addition, I was hoping that there would be some sort of 3D control room where I could interact with my crew, but there's none of that here. This essentially reduces captaining a sub to staring at a series of stations that are visually static, hardly a recipe for immersion.

Sound is one of the most crucial elements of any sub sim. After all, sound is the only way a submarine can effectively find and classify targets. But here again Sub Command fails. Outside of the sonar station, there's virtually no sound at all save for the irritating rumbling of your sub's engines. You know, I was rather expecting there be sound sort of aural payoff for all the work involved in successfully tracking and engaging an enemy. A big, thunderous "boom!" when your torpedo strikes their hull, the sound of seawater rushing in and bulkheads collapsing, and the sharp *thud* as their hull implodes from the water pressure. If I sink a ship up on the surface, I should be able to hear the grinding and screeching of metal as the dying hulk slips beneath the waves and breaks up. But there's absolutely none of this in Sub Command. For a game that touts on the box "you won't just hear the depth charges, you'll feel them," I distinctly remember not hearing any explosions at all, or when I did, it sounded like someone had set a firecracker off in the control room. In the immortal words of Marvin the Martian, "Where's the kaboom?"

When it comes time to really sink your teeth into the game, there's the campaign. Sub Command's campaign is semi-dynamic, meaning that although missions aren't dynamically generated, there is some variation on how the player will proceed through the campaign. If you are detected in one mission, you could be facing much more opposition than if you hadn't. The campaign works well enough for the game, but like everything else, there's a vague sense of ennui about the whole thing. It's just not inviting or involving. Once you've played through it once, I can't imagine anyone wanting to play through it again. After a while it just feels repetitive, and there are absolutely no surprises or twists to lessen the tedium.

Thankfully, there's the mission editor which allows you to create your own missions and share them with other players. It's very easy-to-use and flexible, and the game thankfully models are large number of countries' navies, so if you want to make a series of missions about Russia and the USA teaming up to destroy France, you can. Simmers should be thankful, as it's the only thing that might give Sub Command a hint of longevity.

The game's manual, unfortunately, is spotty at best. It gives some basic information about how to play the game, but doesn't delve into deeper subjects such as oceanic phenomena. For that, you need to consult the dreaded PDF manual on the CD. Printed manuals might be going the way of the dinosaur, but for sims not having one is pretty inexcusable.

For the hardest of the hardcore only

In conclusion, Sub Command makes the fundamental error of expecting the players to get themselves involved. It's an awfully hard game to like; it does not entice you with its graphics or features. If you consider yourself a hardcore naval buff, who doesn't care about immersion, graphics or sound, you might consider picking it up. But to everyone else, keep away.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/09/05