I was in the same boat (excuse the pun) as you OP, and my experience has been a mixed bag, silent hunter 3 is definitely a better game, more subs and more variety in the subs, better German subs and I might be alone in preferring the crew management in sh3 to the one in sh4, I've come across a lot of bugs in sh4 to the point of it being nearly unplayable until I got the U-Boat missions add-on which fixed quite a few but some serious bugs remain, I've spent as much time editing .cfg files and .upc files as playing the game itself but if you're a sh3 veteran you'll probably have gone through that already with sh3.
Overall the crew management needs less micromanagement, the graphics are very nice (but the animation is poorer in my opinion). Keep a lot of save games around because sometimes they get bugged and you'll need to reload several save games back to find an uncorrupted save, the voice acting is poorer and buggier, the subs you'll be using are not as good as German ones with much shallower depth and they're all pretty much the same except a few minor differences, on the plus side they carry more fire-power on average, 6 forward 4 aft torpedoes on most subs. The Japanese ships take more torpedoes to sink from my experience too.
If you can get over the bugs and put in the time to edit the .cfg files to get the game working the way you want it's fun, but it doesn't hold a candle to sh3.
|