I could indulge in a little shadenfreude and rip into what’s become of Naval Action, but in all honesty..I cannot be bothered. Shame…nice sail engine and little else – mile wide, inch deep? So, cajones to that!
What I’ve been ploughing loads of time into the past year is ye old Silent Hunter 3 with GMX gold mod. Wow! Absolutely love it! Along with ERAS, a truly immersive sim (sorry for that…I’ll get my hat). And similar to ERAS it inspires me to read up on the history surrounding the period. I love the tension generated in the game. You go from being the apex predator of the seas, spotting a convoy and stealthily approaching it like a lion stalking gazelles in the savannah, you calculate, aim and fire the torpedoes.. and from that moment the dynamics totally reverse and you become the hunted! I find it incredibly nail-biting trying to dive deeper and slip away at a slight tangent to a destroyers course, all the while listening to its engines as the sound transverses above you. Then the moment of sheer terror as the hydrophone operator utters “Wasser bomb” (depth-charges – oh, you gotta play it in the original german, would be a sin not to!)…and you literally start praying to anyone that will listen…please don’t explode near the U-Boat! Please! Please! And this can go on for hours – literally – but it is never boring. Still glad they added a time compression function – I dont want to spent 3 months In REAL LIFE on one patrol – LOL! And with a bit of luck and guile, you might just drift away undetected, with your propellers revolving at less than once a second sloooow speed to hide the U-Boats noise to the enemy. You live to fight another day. Phew!
You can scale the game’s difficulty to your heart’s content. Want realistic torpedoes? (German electric torpedoes were infamously crap early war years – if they were good, there’s ahigh chance Churchill would be dead! see )). Realistic sinking times, realistic fuel, no third person camera, Manual targetting (hope your trigonometry is good!) – all these can be toggled on or off to your own preference. I play at around 67% realism and would dearly love to get the hang of manual targetting with torpedoes but I find it a hard nut to crack. There’s about 6 videos on pooh-tube from various people explaining how to do this, but they suffer greatly in quality and they all seem to use conversely different methods! Ah well, one day…
Silent Hunter 5 was the last release (nice updated graphics but infamously buggy..and with that modern Ubisoft touch that ruins the long term play/immersion). I’ve picked it up for £2 ($2.50-?) and in the packaging it still lays. Can’t hold a candle to this baby. “Uboat” looks fun but it can’t come anywhere close to the simulation immersion SH3 offers…In my humble opinion and others. The subsim community is lovely, helpful and as untoxic as can be in this day and age if you’re looking for mods and advice. And thats the thing – with mods you can upgrade the old 2003 game to 2010+ standards, taking the improved graphics, sounds etc and ignoring the crap. That’s me sold on it- LOL!
Still, there’s something intrinsically wrong in going to sea in a boat…that sinks… 😉
Give it a try if you like full-on simulations.
.
