Depth Hunter: The Spearfishing Simulator

The Good
There are some games that, right from the start when the load process begins, speak to you and you know you're going to enjoy them. For me this was one of those games. Now the load sequence was not much, it cycled around screens while playing music, but it felt good - so good that I didn't notice that the load took quite a long time and that the DirectX 9.0c install failed.
The music in this game is good, it's one of the few games I've played in the last year or so where I didn't turn the music off after a few minutes. It's a very pleasant ambient sound track that just works with the game beautifully.
The game's controls work well too. The W, A, S, D keys are used for steering and the mouse is used to look around and fire the spear gun, in practice though I spent the whole game with one finger on the 'W' key and steered by using the mouse to look where I wanted to go. The surprise control was the wheel of my wheel-mouse that was used to reel in the fish that I'd speared, that is when the line didn't break. Nice touch. Other than that the controls were surprisingly simple, the only resource is air which is easily replenished by surfacing and the only weapon is the single shot spear gun which does not run out of bolts.

So I liked the music, the controls weren't so complex that I needed the manual by my side at all times, what was the game play like? Well I enjoyed it but I am not sure why. You see the best way I can describe this is game is to say that it plays like a simple space shooter. In a space game you fly around, shooting alien ships that may/may not shoot back, you undertake missions, you score points and it's fast, and it's fun.
Here you swim around slowly, you fire a spear gun which is a single shot device at fish which take the place of small fast moving enemy craft, you undertake missions, score points e.t.c. It's the same game just much slower and yet it's still fun.

The missions themselves aren't much. The first mission - shoot any two fish - didn't seem that hard but it must have taken me five to ten minutes to complete. Mission two was the same but I had to shoot two fish of a specific type, now that was harder because to me one fish is much like another - apart from the ones that look like dinner plates and have pretty stripes on them, they're a bit different. Still after this simple mission I was beginning to see the differences in the basic shapes and behaviour of the fish and so the game progressed.
As the player completes each mission the game introduces other items which are usually fish but I also had to go hunting for a treasure chest as well as individual items.

Obviously in a game like this the graphics play a big part in its success. I thought the water's edge did look a bit like crumpled cellophane and close up the rock detail wasn't that good. I remember thinking that if this had been a mountainside in an airplane scenery pack I'd have been disappointed. But it's not a scenery pack and things do look different underwater so overall I'd still rate the graphics as very good. The fish looked good too, they moved and behaved as individuals or shoals as appropriate.

The Bad
The install process does take a long time. It's followed by another long install process for DirectX 9.0c, which I already had, and that's followed by an automatic check for updates which are automatically downloaded. Three or four updates were downloaded, I noted file sizes of 77MB, when I installed the game and if one of them fails then the game insists on a complete re-install. Another minor irritation is that whenever the game is loaded it hops on-line to check for updates which my firewall didn't like.

The game packaging says that you can dive in different areas of the world, but in-game I had no clue where I was other than 'in the water - somewhere'. I could have looked up the fish I was seeing in the game's library but that's only available from the main menu.

The main problem I had with this game though was that I got lost, frequently, which could be viewed either as a failing in the game or a plus point for being an accurate simulation. So when searching the entire game area for a treasure chest I struggled because there's no in-game map and no way to put down a marker as a reference point. Eventually I did work out a system and used rock formations as landmarks, just as I would in real life I guess, but it was hard work
There is an in-game pointer that is supposed to guide the player towards their next target but I found this ineffective and difficult to use. It would tell me I was within a few meters of the target fish but there'd be nothing there and the static marker I was aiming for in the treasure chest hunt moved around!

The Bottom Line
It 'floats my boat'.

When you look at this game coldly there's not a lot to it. It's a slow paced, single person, single shot, shooter. There are many, many more games out there that have more complexity, more depth, more action and which are more challenging yet somehow this just works.