I hate to be a negative Norbert, but I am a little disappointed at this point. Please
take everything I say with a grain of salt because I am not a game expert or a
programmer and I admit that at this point my thoughts
are half-formed. Also, I do not intend any wounding remarks at all.:p
First, I would have to spend 5-6-hundred dollars to upgrade my "measely"
2gig CPU and associated hardware to optimize this game and I'm not
going to do it just for this game! So it runs a bit slow and the cursor
has palsy. And it crashes often enough, even with the graphics slowed
to SHII (?) levels.
I would also suggest that the control buttons and the sequences for their use is
klutzy and not particularly intuitive.
But all of this is secondary and can be fixed, either by the builders or the modders.
What bothers me is that the game lacks SPIRIT! It doesn't have any American
can-do enthusiasm. It feels sterile to me: abstract and mechanical. SH I was much
better in that respect and SHII Pacific Aces wasn't too bad either. You know, if they
had gotten imput from the right sort of American ex-submariners they could have
given it all that kind of feel which it lacks now.
Also, the crew looks too central European to be a typical American crew. And
they all look like they spend time lifting weights and most US sailors didn't look like
that at all. Hell, I think they look like a bunch of neanderthals. (Maybe that's how
Americans look to Europeans anyway?:p )
I was also expecting a quantitative and qualitative jump in sophistication for this game
and it just isn't there. They may have pushed the graphics to a new level but
there seems to be nothing in the command, control and communications phases
of the game to create new interest for old subsim players. You have a crew of eighty
people and they should be bombarding you with information to help you make
deicisions. There should be a constant flow of messages from ComSubPac, etc. on
Magic decodes of shipping traffic, etc. Where is the human interaction? That's where they really
dropped the ball on this release, in my opinion.
It seems to me that unless there are some pretty serious improvements in this
particular game, there won't be that many new people signing up for the duration
in the Silent Service!
I do hope the designers come up with a couple more patches to make the game better.
In the meantime, I have uninstalled and await further developments. Back to SHIII, NYGMTW!!
Cordailly,
Fritz Wagner
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