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Originally Posted by irishred
Has anyone actually played this yet? Any Impressions?
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Should i be honestly ?
Well i tried it and what can i say ?
Well, lets start with the technical side of it. The sky sucks, there seem to be only one good and one bad weather sky and both sucks, the water is humping nervously around like on drugs and there seem to be always only one seastate.
The view distance is 12 km iirc, can't even remember if there was fog and rain or something.
The boats look not that much authentic, contains errors, and doesn't simulate much beyoned the most essencial things. No TDC, only autotracking mode or you can try it completaly manual. No recognition manual for targets. No bearing scale on the peris. I find the grafics odd, I always have the impression that the ships are far away, even if they are pretty close. Diving times mostly to quick for that old boats. No engine breakdowns, you can run flank all the time. Although there are petrol and diesel boats there are no differences propulsion wise. The petrol boats have no white smoke trail or something, you can't raise the exhoust and ventilation mast or the radio masts. So there is almost no functionality of the boats you can crank the gun and MG but nothing else as fare as i can see. There seem to be no ports in the sim!
I first started to play the training missions but had to cancel after the third one cose else i would had puked(i'm used to much to my hires models) and gone straight to the campaign. First the featured 3 campaigns are actualy only one!
Only one that is divided in to three parts by time frames and you can either choose one or play through all of them in one campaign.
Ok, the missions begin already on the sea somewhere near your home "port" and end also there. Missions are structured always in the same way: "Move to here stay for 24 hours and then return". Your patrol area is always right in the middle of the action. You don't have to lurk up and down the british coast, looking for targets. You are always led right to your prey, you just sit there and they always come pretty much right towards you asking to be torpedoed. It's the same over and over again. Nothing that can be compared with SHIII.
HOWEVER, knowing the war i can say the missions are absolutely authentical! And here's the real (and only) strong point of Shells of sorry ehh.. pardon fury. I even got addicted somewhat becose i was always curious what the next mission will be like. I even felt somethig like excitement during the missions while trying to shadowing my targets. I was even surprized to see that after sinking two of the cresseys the third one came along the one that was still burning on the surface stopping and mimicing the rescue of the crew(what is historical correct), i had't expected so much historical accuracy and had unfortunately no torpedos left.
Btw the ships are always burning when you hit them and they all sink unrealisticaly slow. The ships don't break up in two halfs like in SHIII or something. The enemy ships can spot your periscope kilometers away, when you stick it out for to long. I got spotted almost 3 km away on one occasion.
You can also shoot torps manualy, you can set course, speed and depth of the torpedo. There are also lots of duds, however from all my researches i had the impression that the fuzes were pretty reliably and cannot agree with the game in this regard.
Well after all i must say the game is kinda felicitous but came 9 years to late. That's what you feel when you play it, at least i do. 9 years ago it would have been a pretty fine game.
There are some issues apparently. When i turn the view and get some ditails into the view the turning speed becomes dead slow and often freez, i have to center the view via key and try again, often several times before it works. They also apparently confused 1/3 with 2/3 speed setting when you run on batteries. Neat is that you can run on batteries on the surface if you like. When you surface the batteries get loaded automaticaly and the speed doesn't decrease during loading iirc.
You can also set up radio messages like report position; report contact, report sinking and that's it. I don't see any purpuose for radio communication however, i also never received any replys or radio messages after playing trough 5 missions.
There is one crew member on the bridge when you are on the surface who is completaly static however always looking in to one direction. The gunners move a little bit.
So becose of the very authentical missions i can't say that the game is total ****. The campaign gives a good edjucational value to the game and is the only reason that makes the game worth playing imo(once you got used to the obsolet look and UI of it). Overall it's much below SHII.
Cheers,
Deamon