[Sailor Steve]

Well, it's good that you can walk all through your type VII u-boat, but you still can't play in a Type II or a Type IX.

There is no career mode. They have a so-called "campaign", but it has nothing to do with the actual goals of a u-boat captain in World War II. Especially grating are the demands to sink X ships or Y tonnage. No captain was ever told "Well, you've successfully completed the Happy Times. Which campaign would you like to try now?"

There is no crew. They made a big point of being able to talk to the crew, of even having to talk to them to keep morale up. Unfortunately the 'conversations' are so limited and so silly that it's worse than not having that function at all. And that's just the officers. The enlisted crew have been removed entirely. Sure, you can see some of them now, but they have no names. With SH3 Commander you have 1.7 billion possible name combinations, all based on real u-boatmen.

I'm told that SH5 is the first of the series that has a working Ship Names function, so the ships you sink get historic names. That's a good thing. I tried to get them to add in the correct tonnage for each ship, offering to do the work myself, since I've already done the research for SH3.

And the ships themselves. How many different merchant types are there in SH5? Six? Seven? Thanks to a handful of modders there are more than one hundred different merchant types in SH3. My understanding is that people are having trouble adding any new merchants at all to SH5.

It's a beautiful game, and a lot of people are very happy with it. I had a lot of fun the week my poor ancient computer ran it before it just couldn't anymore. If I ever get a decent computer I would cheerfully play it and nothing else if all those things were addressed. SH5 is a better game than anything that has come before, but as a historical simulation it doesn't come close. Until it actually has more to offer in that department SH3 will still get top place on my computer.