[MENTAT]

You asked for it steed!


The new interface in SHIV has fewer options for stations, but the interface is more cumbersome. You can still select a specific station by pressing a function key or by mouse clicking (you can no longer get to most stations by walking around the virtual sub as you could in SHIII) but the sub menus are no longer mapped to keys. In fact, should you select a station via function key rather than by mouse click, the sub menu does not even update so you cannot choose any of the station specific commands as the on screen menu does not refresh.

Graphically, the game looks much, much worse than SHIII. The resolution is still locked at 1024 x 768 but anti-aliasing is not available. Ubi decided it was more important to add utterly useless bells and whistles such as weeds on the sea floor or shafts of light refracting in the water. All very nice, but the jaggies are so bad that any ship you try to look at through your periscope appears to be a pixellated mess. It's impossible to even discern the shape of a ship in the mess, let alone try to ID a specific ship type. Further, for whatever reason, the graphics engine is very poorly optimized. The minimum requirements listed on the box are only slightly higher than those of SHIII, but the game runs like stuttering molasses on any but the most powerful of machines, even with the extra graphics features turned off.

Almost all sounds have been copied directly from SHIII and they often cut out before they've finished playing.

The game still offers up a dynamic campaign, much like in SHIII but throws a lot of time specific scripted events at you in an attempt to make it feel more historic. That's a nice idea, but it feels more like an over the top Hollywood action movie. Zeros and Bettys appear out of nowhere with far too much frequency and spot you automatically, no matter what the time of day or the weather. Getting strafed 40+ per patrol is not fun, it's annoying. Also I have found is the enemy's un-nerving ability to find my sub when I'm outside of their field of view/sensors/sound sensing equipment, it just doesn't make sense.

The AI seems inept, with merchants and destroyers ploughing into each other with alarming frequency. There are also some serious bugs and features which were not implemented upon release which should be mandatory. The chronometer doesn't work, nor does the estimate speed function. This means it's effectively impossible to manually plot your torpedo attacks. You either have to scale back the realism and use the cheat which means the game automatically plots a perfect firing solution for you every time, or you have to "guestimate" the approximate speed and fire a spread, hoping for a hit.

Radar is also broken. The station is entirely unusable. SONAR doesn't work unless you man the station yourself. The AI operator is incapable of hearing anything. Should a sub compartment get damaged and later repaired, it's still unusable as any crew put into that compartment become wounded. Should your home base fall to the enemy while you are out on patrol, you're not informed of this and will end up sailing into a hostile port and get sunk. Not the most satisfying way to end a patrol. I could go on. There are literally dozens of game killing bugs.

Couple this with the frustration of having to infiltrate Yokohama harbour about four times in a row for photo recon and being told to patrol and sink shipping in a certain area only to find no time period defined for the length of patrol and no response when shipping has been sunk in the area, the game can get very annoying very quickly.

Moreover,
Whilst diving, gunners stay at their posts and get drowned

the deck gun stops for no apparent reason

STUPID pop up tools get in the way of everything, orders you need to give are hidden away behind these bloody things so that you have to close one or manually move it to get to the underlying control

STUPID STOPWATCH, insist on popping up every time you accelerate time above 256 X ? It then takes up space and gets in the way of everything

scrolling with the mouse happens only when the program bothers to let you. Sometimes ok, mostly not

The automatic Zooming function gets in the way of speedy control. Lets say a 10 degree port turn, you point to the turn you want, then because the bloody thing automatically zooms in, your 10 degree turn becomes a 20 degree turn

I watched in amazement when I sank a destroyer, watched it sink only to pop up out of the sea again some seconds later. it must have leapt 30 ft out of the sea. (just like those fishy type submarines in the old Stingray movies!)

You keep getting told that oxygen level is low and must surface when it isnt the case?

I have an Alienware Aurora with 2 megs of mem and and yet I wait ages to access any messages that have been drawn to my attention.

The warnings of ship sightings given in Lat/Long. I cant see which sighting they are referring to? Why not just have a simple grid/letter index like they did in SH 3? You can only take realism so far without screwing up the gameplay.

Don't even get me started on the lack of help in the manual or the repetitive sound effects or the fact you can spend hours stalking into a harbour only to take one mild hit on the casing and promptly sink to the bottom of the sea.

The game is bug ridden, missing features, and so poorly optimized that it runs like a slide show with no AA. Steer well clear. It's a big disappointment.