Americans and Germans in WWII Submarine Battle

Author's Rating:

Pros: Fun and easy to come back to. Good graphics.

Cons: Lacking in the plot department.

The Bottom Line: 
I'd buy it if you love submarines like me, or like a good challenge. it is harder than you might think.

Author's Review
Silent Hunter IV: Wolves of the Pacific is a real time strategy game based during WWII in the Pacific and the islands around Japan, China, Australia and Philippines. You control a submarine in this setting in almost every way imaginable. You control the basics like depth, direction and speed as well as choosing targets and destroying them, evading the enemy and doing special missions like dropping of spies onto land, doing photo recons and general patrols of specific areas. In the expansion pack, which is the version I am talking about, you can play as a German submarine as well and can perform similar missions. I like playing both. I should mention this game is for PC and Mac computers, not a PS3 or Xbox 360 or anything.

I like this game because it is very very challenging, and no one likes to get bored with a game, now do we. I think it is great that you can control every aspect of the game in a realistic manner. I like being able to use strategy to evade enemy ships that try to blow me out of the water with depth charges while I at the same time try to destroy  enemy merchants and other large ships like air craft carriers. It is never the same with this game; you're always finding new types of ships to destroy. I also like these missions they give you because it breaks it up from the usual drone of things like Silent Hunters III, the game before this one, where all you would ever do is get let loose in the Atlantic to destroy whatever you wanted and not much else. The missions actually require some thought because they put you in very tricky situations. For instance, if you have to drop off a spy in Tokyo, a heavily guarded port city, the first thing is you have to wait for night time to surface to avoid detection, you have to be very quite as you approach the destination as not to be heard by destroyers, you have limited batteries so you can't go the whole way under water and you also have limited air. The biggest problem is that the water is so shallow and if you get detected, you have nowhere to go, the destroyers can easily detect you and you can't out run them surfaced or not. Tough game. You also have to worry about going too deep if there is that availability of depth, because if you do, the submarine you're in will implode and everyone onboard will drown. To destroy a ship you can use the deck gun to blow things up like merchants. You can do this for naval ships as well, but they shoot back and they have more firepower than you do and you need to be surfaced to do that. Torpedoes are the other way to make a kill. These are sneaky and hard for the enemy to spot, because when they seem them coming, more often than not it is too late to move out of the way. Sometimes however a torpedo will go right under the enemy and not blow up. This happened in WWII, and it happens a lot in the game, so some times it is a good idea to shoot more than one torpedo, just to make sure. You can fire torpedoes from the bow or the stern of your ship.
This is a fairly realistic game in terms of graphics and quality. You won't fool anyone into thinking it is really life, but at least it doesn't look like the Pac man games everyone used to play. I'd say the graphics are good, but not great. You can see extreme detail, like little people walking on ships, water leaking into your submarine, the texture of water from the periscope, everything. It still looks like a video game. Some video games these days look very real, almost totally lifelike. This game strives for it, but I think because it is such a complex game they couldn't make everything as real as some smaller games. Still, even when you get hit by a depth charges the submarine shakes and groans like no other and that scary.

I for one love the option of upgrading in games. Don't like your submarine? Well if you do well enough in your campaign, you will be given a better one. Want some better equipment? If you do well at sea you'll be given points in which you can buy better equipment like radar, sonar, guns, torpedoes, better crew members, everything that'll make your boat run better and faster. You can only do this when you're not at sea. When you're not at sea you’re in a room that looks like submarine headquarters. You have to click on the things in the room to do these things, but it is very easy to do so.

Most of the playing you do will be in campaign mode. You can choose to be an American or a German. When you choose, you decide what year you want to start and what base you want to have as a home base. If you start as an American, your home base will change a lot because of Japanese takeovers. You then can build upon your campaign and save it and come back to it. You campaign will end if you at any point die or the war ends. If you don't want to do a campaign you can also do single missions, where once the task is completed or you die, the game is over. You only have a handful of missions though, and they don't change ever. One fun mission is to destroy aircraft carriers, and as hard as it is, if you get one or two, you feel great.

A lot of the controls of the game are done with your keyboard. Speed is controlled with the number keys and things like actions are done with letters. Dive is D, crash dive is C, periscope depth is P, etc. Turn left is [ and right is ]. You can also control other things with your mouse by clicking on the compass to change direction or on the depth gauge to set a specific depth. You can also plot courses on the map and the sub will go in that route to wherever. You can also command people to go into battle stations or to repair parts of the ship. You can even go into parts of the sub and take over specific operations, like controlling the sonar or radar or the torpedo computer. I usually just let the crew do things like that unless I want something specific.

The sound of things in the game are good. Things that are closer are louder than things further away, the sound collection is varied, and you don't always hear the same noise recording over and over again, which annoys me. I like it how they have a vast sound collection so that it doesn't feel like I'm playing a game, it feels like I'm in the moment. There are a lot of sounds actually, like the groaning of the ship, the splash of water on the bow, closing of steel doors, the sound of torpedoes launching, everything. They even have music but I turn it off because it gets a bit old.

For those who need it there are difficulty settings so that you don't have to play at the hardest level right away. Difficulty settings change the realism of the game, like how long it takes to reload torpedoes, dud torpedoes, how easy it is to evade the enemy and how much damage you can take. There are many more factors but those are some big ones. I like to play on the most realistic and difficult setting because anything else isn't challenging.

As for playability, this game does not seem to be the one I'd like to play all the time but I can keep coming back to. It is fun but it doesn't have much for interaction like a lot of other games do, and sometimes I need that. The plot is lacking unless you consider history to be a plot for a game (it is not enough for me). It is a good comeback game.