Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific (PC)

Having a full 3d command and control centre adds to the atmosphere as well, especially when the sub takes a hit from a depth charge. Depending on the level of damage things may break, water may rush in from burst pipes and dials shatter as the glass cracks. The lighting changes from a comforting white to an angry red, flickers and then goes out.

You’re left in the dark as you watch the depth gauge slowly increase, it gets faster and faster – you know at that point that there’s no coming back and you are about to meet your fate as the crushing embrace of the ocean crumples your submarine like it were made out of tin.

And like the previous offering the dials, gauges and various controls aren’t just there for show – you can interact with all the stations via the mouse.

The game has realistic day/night cycles and features advanced weather system simulation tied into the graphics, running below the thermal layer and taking your boat down to perilous depths all have an effect on the graphics and animations, the crew aren’t static and neither are the various parts of the ship.

The opposition, neutral and friendly forces have the same gorgeous amount of detail as your submarine and half the fun of the game is switching to the external camera to admire all the vessels and aircraft as you sneak about under the ocean.

Of course none of this would be any good without some decent sound to back it up, and I can say that Silent Hunter 4 post patch has a lot more in terms of crew vocals, it seemed a little barren pre-patch 1.1 but this didn’t really affect the gameplay. I’m all for having more and more interactivity and atmosphere and the 1.1 brings it in buckets.

The submarine engines and the various other sounds are all there as they were in SH3, except this time there’s more oral detail than before. The sounds as the submarine dives into dangerous depths increase, the pressure on the hull makes the vessel shudder and you can almost hear the various bolts and welds giving way as you push further down, you know you can only stay there for a short while before the whole thing buckles but it’s worth it to keep from being detected.

The sound helps immensely to draw you into the atmosphere the developers have tried to create, the soft thoom of the water as it’s displaced by the depth charges and the heavy crack as they go off, muffled by the water almost shakes the submarine. It is worth it to get into trouble like this just once, to hear and see the effects.

Married to the absolutely cracking audio is a sumptuous full orchestral sweeping soundtrack, the music to the game being one of the highlights for me overall – I love a good theme tune and Silent Hunter 4 has some truly uplifting pieces. A personal favourite of mine is the pounding introductory military tune that rises to a blistering crescendo and then slowly trails off.
You can feel the emotion that Rod Abernathy and Jason Graves have created in their soundtrack to the game; it works perfectly and gets top marks from me.

The AI in Silent Hunter 4 is a lot better than 3 and has been tweaked; the destroyers will run search patterns and attempt to flush you out. Merchants might make a break for a safe passage and you can use this in co-op to set up coordinated attacks where one of you plays the bait and attempts to lure defensive ships away from the juicy cargo freighters.

Watch out however, because the AI will use radio communications to bring in other assets from the area, aircraft and sub-hunters can be dispatched along with other fleets depending on where you are in the Pacific Ocean and how close you are to an enemy port or allied area.

The theatre of war is not static; it will continue to evolve as you play based on your actions as well as actions of allied/enemy/neutral units involved. You might surface your boat close to Midway to find you’re in the middle of a battle there or suddenly discover that an allied fleet is being attacked by an enemy fleet, you can choose to divert your submarine and assist them.

I love living worlds like this.

So with excellent gameplay, fantastic music, good sound and some highly detailed graphics Silent Hunter 4 rises well above Silent Hunter 3 for me. But that’s not all, there’s also the return of the multiplayer, featuring co-op gameplay with a wolf pack of up to 8 other players, against various scenarios and even some randomly created missions where the host sets up the parameters and decides on the presence/strength of enemy units.

New to Silent Hunter 4 there is an adversarial gameplay option where one player is in control of a fleet and the others are tasked with sinking his assets. The player can give commands to his units whilst the submarines sneak around and engage targets at will based on their orders.

Based on your realism options (no external camera etc) you can further tailor the MP experience to how you want it, if being unable to see your targets in glorious 3d floats your boat (as I know it does for some hardcore sub sim folks) as you work to coordinate attacks with your comrades whilst avoiding the eagle eye of human or AI players, you can do just that.

The MP was flawless on the two machines I tested it on, and thanks to Serpent for helping out there too.

No Silent Hunter review would be complete without a big shout out to the folks at Subsim.com who provide the best forums for submarine related information and modding support on the net for virtually every sub game you can think of. Their support of Silent Hunter 3 and the level of quality of the mods made the game even better – I can’t wait to see what they have in store for Silent Hunter 4.

So to Neal Stevens and the folks of Subsim, I fire off a post and pre-emptive thanks!

Added: 03rd April 2007: I'd like to note that as mentioned in the forum post of the game, I experienced no game breaking bugs in the 1.1 version of SH4, no crashes to desktop, no errors with crew members eyes popping out of their heads, or their models going 2d etc.

I experienced no frequent crashes to desktop when using the submarine for extended periods, I could fiddle with the realism settings to my heart's content (and did) to see the various options. I had no missing sounds or strange blocks sticking up out of the water - nothing happened that spoilt the game for me and since I don't run a microscope over the code to look for bugs, nor do I actually have an advanced trigonometry knowledge regarding the exact angles used for attacking in manual mode, so I couldn't tell you if there was a bug there either.

Every icon worked perfectly, every dial was fine...and I could manipulate a lot of the controls (not as though I really sat down and played with the Sonar or so on for more than a few moments - not with enemy ships to sink)

The same can be said about the second computer the game was tested on, Serpent had no problems at all on his machine and he is running a vastly different configuration to myself.

However, in the spirit of cooperation here's a list from Subsim's forums of the various glitches and bugs that can be present in the game - since they didn't happen to me or Serpent we can't intentionally rate the game down (especially for things we never saw).

If you want to wait until 1.2 before getting the game, you'll be missing out on a superb simulation of submarine warfare. But there will be people out there of the highly vocal majority that'll tell you the game sucks - as always, don't listen to me (or them), make up your own minds by playing it.

List of potential bugs