Silent Hunter II Review - PC

In the words of the late Desi Arnaz, someone’s got some splainin’ to do, because that someone pushed this fourth release in one of my favorite series ever out the door too soon, missing features and toting some pretty depressing bugs. That’s with the v1.1 patch, by the way, which after its glitch fixes adds can-you-believe-it-shipped-without end game movies, torpedo planes, career mode features (like the ability to end one), and interface mouseover tooltips. Not a promising start.

On the other hand, we should probably be grateful someone’s doing submarine sims at all these days, much less World War II campaigns set in the underrated Pacific. The same developer let Silent Hunter 3 out the door early as well, and it certainly came into its own after a couple patches. The question, as usual, is whether you’re willing to gamble, because—no question about it—with sufficient TLC, Silent Hunter 4 has the potential to swing round from a wobbly kind of good to great.

Pacific Specific

Silent Hunter 4, or as it’s technically known without the numeric, Wolves of the Pacific, is fourth in a series of no-frills sub simulations reaching back to 1996. The original DOS-based Silent Hunter by kaput designer SSI let sim fans blow ballasts and tweak Torpedo Data Computers (TDCs) to the tune of nine patrol zones in the Pacific post-Pearl Harbor through the closing days of World War II. After two sequels skippering U-Boats around the Atlantic, SH4 brings things full circle and back to the days of faster, longer range 10-tube U.S. boats—six classes total with historical upgrades—dueling with Japanese Zeros, sinking merchant ships, and evading terrifying Akizuki (the name means “Autumn Moon”) destroyers.

Of course the barrier to entry is steep as it’s always been. You get a laughably brief four-mission tutorial that tells you how to make a U.S. diesel-powered Porpoise-class sub move and shoot with typed-up crib notes but little else. The 100-page manual wastes half its slender girth on unexplained feature lists and boat shots duplicated in your sub’s identification guide. The interior sub interface itself inexplicably excises the option to click on crewmen to issue orders (most functions are now limited to the bottom screen toolbar), removing a cool optional visual mnemonic many relied on in SH3. You can tweak the realism settings on a 100-point scale, but that won’t make it any easier to understand how the new damage and crew management systems operate, or if you’ve never used them before, sonar, radar, and half the little slide-outs employed in torpedoing. In other words, SH4 out of the box is like a piece of alien technology—incredibly cool looking, but missing or merely skimming crucial what-fors and how-tos.

A Submariner’s Life For Me

But if you’re patient, message board savvy, and can appreciate the psychological payoff of manually calculating torpedo Gyro Angles using Angle Solvers and a little trigonometric know-how, there’s nothing quite like a Silent Hunter game. Huddled in your submersible sardine can, you employ sonar and radar to locate and stalk vessels several times your size. Understanding how depth and speed relate to acoustics dictates where you pop your periscope and who or from what angle you attack first. If you’re spotted (heard or seen) your only recourse is to dive, which in SH4 is an even more white-knuckling experience, since the U.S. subs modeled tended to be less maneuverable and less able to sustain great depths. Dip much below 50 meters in a P-class Porpoise and things buckle and spray in a hurry.

Pick career mode and you’ll start a tour from ’41 through ’45 running patrols, recon missions, supply routes, and more against the backdrop of a dynamic Pacific theater. Objectives are now assigned based on how well you’re doing—succeed under increasingly difficult circumstances and the Commander Submarine Force (COMSUBPAC) will dish out tougher but more rewarding missions. Don’t imagine you’ve just purchased the World War II version of Elite, however, since as usual SH4 doesn’t simulate the entire ecosystem so much as “micro” conflict pockets, and if you probe too closely out of patrol bounds, you’ll often find ships in places they wouldn’t have historically traveled. So either “dynamic” within your patrol parameters, or buggy—take your pick.

A more immediate way to experience the best aspects of SH4 is to fire up any of its historical missions, say Midway, the Philippines, Samar Bay, Balikpapan, and so on. The game does much better in pre-staged scenarios with often nail-chewing odds, and save for occasionally baffling A.I. decisions like ships that turn toward you when they should be running scared, nothing beats gutting an escort with a few carefully timed and angled torpedo salvos before laying waste to the merchant ships it was shepherding.

Better still, if you can find four players (online), or however less likely, eight for LAN, you can run co-op patrols with fellow sub captains, usually aiming to sink a certain amount of tonnage. But SH4 also includes a curious “adversarial” mode which lets one player (the server operator) take control of the enemy escorts themselves and, employing a sort of macro RTS-style interface, send them searching and telegraphing around the area in a bid to sink the other players’ submarines. And it mostly succeeds, even letting you drop depth charges on mark, though you’ll probably spend as much time in the map setting vectors and behavior characteristics and wishing you had finer control of your “zigzag” vs. “speed-up/slow-down” convoys.

Wave Machine

How do you make great looking waves better? You make them bigger, of course, and if SH4 isn’t quite the visual leap SH3 was a few years ago, think of the improvements as function over form. Bigger waves make it much harder to spot ships in choppy seas if you’re at periscope depth, forcing you to risk shallower running. Improved translucent water effects make it obvious (finally) that airplanes can spot you pretty easily at 10 to 15 meters depth. And while these next are pure candy, it’s tough to argue with visually gratifying adds like visible compartments and holes in damaged ships, seafloor vegetation, and individually discernible light rays on and under water now filled with transient impurities. The only kick in the shins is that the engine’s still somehow keyed to 1024x768 pixel lines, so if you run it higher-res, it simply upscales those pixels, making everything jaggy and actually harming your ability to visualize distant objects.

So here’s the deal. SH4 slipped out the door too soon, no doubt about it. But it’s by the same team that brought us SH3, the same team that fixed the latter game in a hurry, and most (though certainly not all) of its features work well enough with the v1.1 patch to overlook the rare crash-to-desktop and occasionally weird A.I. behavior. This is the premiere submarine simulation on the market, and for the most part it delivers what the designers said it would. And while Silent Hunter’s harder-nosed target demographic shouldn’t have to wait for more patching to fix this flawed diamond, chances are they will.

Article by: Matt Peckham
Video produced by: Mark Fahey