i ordered shells of fury from amazon.de
and it turned up today...(3 days to deliver from germany to the uk.. not bad)
here's my initail impressions of the game..
1/ it runs with out the dvd in the drive-- which always puts me at ease with a game..purely for convience sake and it shows the devs are IMO see-ing things from the players point of view ..
2/it isn't on first glance an easy sim to play ie it's not arcade in nature..
3/it's obviuosly eminiently moddable...
4/it's worth buying just to see the excellent WW1 models in action..
5/it's in german so i haven't got a clue what half the buttons options do... lol
going to have to babelfish them to find out what does what why and how..
6/the AI seems to be very good ..for example a lone merchant on spotting me approaching... immediately turned round and high tailed it away in the opposite direction to it's original course.......making this the first subsim i've played where a lone merchant does this..i chased it..caught it and every time i turned to fire it maneuvered away from me again making it damn near impossible to get anything remotely like an easy shot...
this in itself is far FAR in advance of lone merchant AI behaviuor displayed (as stock) in other similar sims (SH2/3/4 et al)
the normal lone merchant AI response (if your lucky that is) in the SH2/3/4 games is for it to zig zag but basically carry onsteaming towards you....this merchant in shells of fury had a much better plan of action....it worked i could not get into a good firing position at all ..for torps anyway) !!
7/i'm a fan of WW1 stuff so it has the edge in that area..
8/the graphics etc are customisable..so i was able to get it running reasonably well on my machine (which is quite old...tho it ran Sh3 very well)
9/the actual graphics are atmospheric...but not it has to be said in any way stunning...but it looks well to me
10/it occasionaly stalls on loading some of the stock missions..requiring a ctrl/alt/delt/ exit
11/there are no crew voices at all?? maybe an option i haven't found...can't see any crew sound files anywhere tho..that's a shame if true
12/IMO it was well worth the money and has with any luck...a great deal of flexible future possibilites due to the open ended and editable file structure.. as far as i can tell there isn't a single elemnt of the game graphics ..sound.. weather... effects...missions..campaigns and even model files that cannot be added to edited and enhanced
13/if your a fan of WW1....and enjoy subsims etc...and enjoy modding a entirely open and freely editable game of such....BUY IT...you won't be too disapointed ..and who knows you may find out it is home from home
gets a thumbs up from me...
tho only time will tell of course..