UBoat - first impression
 

After not playing any sub sims for a few years, I decided to fire up SH3, and with a bit of a heavy heart I came away from my session thinking the old girl had aged quite a bit. In fairness SH3 is a 20 year old release (even if I still remember firing it up for the first time), so a bit of aging was to be expected. But looks wise, it just doesn't do it any more, even with the mods.


I thought "it's time to retire her and get a new sim". So, having been aware of UBoat for some time and having bought it but never played it for nearly 2 and half years (the reviews weren't great) I reckoned it was time to get back into to Atlantic and start sinking some enemy ships.


Well, that's what I thought was going to happen.


What really happened was me struggling to get to grips with what the hell I was supposed to be doing at any given time and little within the atrocious UI made and sense to me. I had no idea what to press to get to where I needed to be and if I moved to a different station, the character I was controlling at a given time seems to always want to bugger off to somewhere else on the ship. There is absolutely nothing intuitive about the game in any way, despite having many years behind me playing submarine games (I cut my teeth on Aces of the Deep). In short, the controls are terrible.


I find the method of targeting an enemy ship confusing in the extreme and I hate the way I have to leave first person and go to a cutaway every time I need to get someone else to do something. It gives me PC whiplash and takes me completely out of the sim.



I'm also not really that much of a fan of the limited RPG elements that are involved and crew management can be a bit annoying, to say the least. Plus the AI can be really, really, sketchy at times. I know that the crew are simulated "green" to begin with and you level them up with XP, but we were practically on top of a ship before anyone called out "smoke on the horizon". Nobody can be that blind and be in service. :haha:


As of today, I keep firing it up thinking that I'll eventually master the game (I'm no stranger to doing that with PC games) but every time I end up quitting in frustration and feeling that I'm just wasting my time with this one. :wah:


I understand that UBoat is still a WIP and that it has come on leaps and bounds since it first came out (I shudder to think what state it was in when it first released), but as of May 2025 it still feels like there's a bit of a way yet to go with this game.


It's unfortunate. I want to like UBoat, I really do, but I just cannot get into it no matter what. I'll keep giving it a few more tries and tweaking it here and there to see if I can get a suitable U-Boat sim experience from it. But, at this point I think I might just be better off giving SH5 with the Wolves of Steel mod a go.

Welcome back!
 

The Sim needs a user manual and a tutorial pdf that you can use and follow along with. You Videos are good but do not replace the written word.

Jeffg

A standard user manual would be great alright, but I think there's still a lot of creases to be ironed out in the game itself, a lot of which are standard UI and UX issues.


However, there is never a moment when I don't feel that the game is going to do something that breaks it. For instance, last night I tried another go and after finding out how to do a crash dive, which is really easy in SH3/4, I ordered one and found out that the boat was unable to go below 25m! Plus the sounds of compression on the hull started and the food hanging in front of the Observation periscope started bouncing around like there was a hurricane blowing through the boat. :doh:


Just weird.


Also, why the hell do random sailors keep going up to the periscope and using it? Thus giving away any stealth your boat may have. :o


I really want to like this game, but by christ it makes it hard to do.

OK, I'm done.


Fired up a session tonight and played a few patrols as a skipper only. Everything was going ok. I didn't make any contacts with the enemy, but I did manage to sink a type VII that was on damaged and on the surface with all the crew dead (which I thought was a cool little side mission).


But then, eventually, I did make contact with some Brits.

Unfortunately when they saw me and I tired to dive to evade the destroyers, I found that I couldn't dive below 25m, no matter what I set the dive depth to.


This game is awful.


Guess I'll just have to make do with SH5 and the WoS mod. Or just go back to a 20 year old game that actually works.

well, it sounds like a bad experience

I still wait for Type IX DLC so I didnt try the game myself yet.

A type IX is the least of this game's worries. There are fundamental problems with how the game functions over all. Simple command executions are completely absent, like ordering a crash dive, surface, periscope depth or just easy rudder commands. All of these should be simple key strokes. That kind of thing has been present in sub games since the 90's.


What the devs have done is very good, don't get me wrong, and it's a small team from what I've read. But there is so much that's missing from a simple operation POV.


I think the most frustrating about UBoat is that there is so, so, much potential within it that it, inevitably, becomes bitterly disappointing because the simple stuff just doesn't work.

I know - I just missed the Type IX in game.

Those missing commands really should be there, especially when you need to do some action under time pressure like crash dive.

Huh, strange. I jumped into it and found the interface rather intuitive. Unless you talk about the FPP experience, which I have not tried so far. You're right that the game could use some keyboard shortcuts but remember that you can quickly switch between dials with F3, F4 and F5 keys and all diving commands are next to the depth dial. Works for me.

So far the game is just too easy for me, at least early war which I played so far and small variety of ships makes it feel a bit repetitive after a while. The North Sea is crowded with (identical) vessels and lack of any extended rest period before patrols means you can score tens of thousands of tonnage before October 1939! In SH4 it sometimes takes days to find any target and it's not unusual to return from a patrol empty handed. So every encounter is exciting. In Uboat it's dive-hydrophone scan- intercept-sink, rinse and repeat.

But as you said the potential is huge, I'm looking forward to further development.

Oh I know the shortcuts for the dials and whatnot. But I think that something as crucial as a crash dive absolutely must be a key press.


SH4 is a different kettle of fish entirely. I've gone several patrols and never saw a sausage. But I kinda like that TBH. And if you get the chance to intercept a juicy target like a battleship or a carrier, it can be quite exciting.


In any case, if I'm to have any kind of U-Boat fix, I think I'm just gonna have to install SH3 again and put up with the dated look.



Maybe in the coming year UBoat will be knocked into better shape that it is currently and I'll happily eat my negative words about it.

I hope so too. The only thing that worries me is that Uboat seems to be discounted to 10 EUR quite often. I hope I'm wrong but I read it as a sign of it's market potential already peaking and an attempt to milk some remaining, less paying customers. This would mean less and less revenue for the devs. Hope they will stick to the project.

maybe devs would add those keyboard shortcuts if people would ask for them a lot.

:agree:

Yeah. I think the dev's may have missed an opportunity to add further content as paid for expansions, in the same way IL2 do. They could have released the Med, Carribean, South Atlantic as paid for additional content for example, and included additional sub versions and more ships etc.


And I say that not because I want to pay more, but because I agree the game has potential, and if revenue is going to limit development then it would be a shame if development stops at this point.


I picked the game up in a sale and frankly I wasn't expecting much, but it is enjoyable and the bones are definitely there. Playing in FPS mode is much like SH5, albeit a bit clunky. What it lacks at this point is detail and refinement, but it most definitely has potential. Will it be able to deliver? I hope so.

Welcome back!