Then you'll pick up a ship on radar or sonar and zero in on it by drawing lines and circles on the map and doing complex maths, or by guessing. If you're hardcore, you'll play it in real-time, but most of us mortals don't have four years to spare, so the ability to speed the game up to around 8,000 times normal helps. Most of the time you're just sitting in your bridge, scanning the horizon, making sure the three shifts of your (scarily silent, deadeyed) sailors aren't tired, that your boat isn't leaking, picking up the news, reporting on historical events and so on. It's more about management than action, but it combines the two slickly.
Once you get past that initial irritation, it's one of the best underwater games. Struggle - working out that firing is done with the space bar rather than the mouse, that zooming works with the tab and so on. Your orders are communicated via radio messages, which are hidden at the screen's right Sadly, the game hardly tells you the basics, so your first half hour is a However, if you've never played a Silent Hunter game before, you'll be confused by the tutorials. You control a WWI I submarine (Silent Hunter III was solely German WWI-based) in the Pacific rim, sinking Japanese ships from Pearl Harbour to the East China Sea.
Silent Hunter is another game that breeds war stories, the old guts-and-glory nonsense that Canderous spouted so hypnotically in Knights Of The Old Republic.
And we wonder why the Daily Mail hates videogames. I've just been rewarded for killing thousands of people. So when I fire two torpedoes and it sinks in about ten seconds, leaving nothing but empty bobbing life-rafts, I feel guilty but my reputation has soared. There's 10,000 Tons of ship sat in front of my sub's bow and I can't sink it Not because I haven't the ammo, not because it's escorted by destroyers, and not because of a mutiny.