Silent Hunter II

The Good
There are a lot of things to like about SHII. The graphics are fairly good, if not excellent, the sounds are better than average, and most of the simulation engine seems to work pretty well. If a destroyer sees you and comes to get you, I think you'll be as impressed as I was about how good they are at their jobs.

In general the "whole idea" of tracking down a convoy and then trying to execute your attack without getting blasted seems very well done. And that's what a sub game is all about. So in that respect I have to give this game very high marks.

Frankly I can't understand Rick's review... bad graphics and sound, not buggy? Was he playing the same game?

The Bad
The problem I have is a lack of technical depth. It's like the authors "kinda" understood what they were doing, but didn't really. I see this a lot, so it's not too surprising.

One perfect example is the Type III torpedo, the German's fancy homing torp that let them take on the destroyers in a snapshot situation. The manual tells you how they work, except that they don't in the game. That's right, they simply don't home. They run in a nice straight line 5 feet in front of the bow and you miss, so sorry. Actually none of the torps seem quite right -- another thing the torps had magnetic fuses that let them trigger in a near-miss, but that doesn't work either.

Then there's they way that the enemy ships can shoot at you in fog, while you cannot do the same in return. And the way the weather is the same over the entire atlantic for an entire mission. Then there's the mission bugs, I spend days running the north sea gauntlet to return to base at Willemshaven like the mission brief said, only to see that the home base was actually Lorient in another screen. Damage control consists of getting more and more damaged until you die. No really, there's a little meter in the damage control screen, and when it reaches zero, mission over. Or the way the first few missions are very detailed and reasonably easy to figure out, whereas the later missions drop you far from the action, give you useless information, and you basically have to try over and over to figure out what you're supposed to do.

The whole game is like this. Some portions are very well done up to a point, and then the dull edge comes through.

And finally there's the UI, which changes from screen to screen. For instance in most screens a right-click will put you in the"move this thing around" mode so you can quickly turn the periscope or AA gun. Ahhh, but that doesn't work for the main gun. Why?

Generally the game seems to suffer from V2 problems -- the authors were apparently copying the older game without really understanding what they were doing.

The Bottom Line
It's pretty good in most ways, and I have had a few missions where I had a death grip on the mouse, but the bugs and general lack of depth is distracting.