Customer Reviews

Silent Hunter: Battle of the Atlantic

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(69)

 

 

I have an internet connection set up to where my computer plugs directly in to a cable modem. From the wireless network I have set up, I am able to stream HD movies onto my xbox360 with no problems. Even with a stable internet, I have had one crash to dekstop. Immedtiately after the CTD I reloaded the game and was able to play for about 3 minutes before I was kicked off due to conncetion problems. Since I was still able to get online immediately after being kicked off, one can draw the conclusion that either Ubi's servers were down for a time or that the DRM is extremely unforgiving regarding how long it waits for internet connection to resume. From this, one an draw the conclusion that even with a steady internet, you will still have problems playing the game. To be fair, it only happened those two times during my 5 hours of gameplay, however it was enough for me to be pretty annoyed with it. I can only imagine what it would be like for people who travel or who have DSL and can only play when the weather is nice. I understand the need to protect intellectual property, but as has been stated a number of times already, all this does is hurt the law abiding consumer. I personally have a hard time understanding this decision as it will probably cause Ubisoft to lose a significant amount of money for PC sales (although I am sure it will be compensated for by console sales but why not try to maximize your profit?). People who pirate games are still going to find a way to crack this and even if they don't, they are just going to wait until the game comes down in price to the point where no profit will be made from it. The only people being driven away are the people who would have otherwise legally bought the game.

DRM aside, This game has also been a huge let down in gameplay. I have already found a number of bugs such as not being able to return to course after you perform a manuever, not being able to flood multiple tubes at once, or not being able to use the deck gun (if there is a way it isnt explicitely stated in the manual which is painfully short on details for a game with so many changes over previous versions). A number of features have been also dumbed down. There do not apppear to be any thermal layers, ways to release counter measures such as debris, and targeting for torpedoes is done through an unrealistic tactical map which does not make things easier. Manual targeting is not explained in the manual and there is not tutorial for it. Also many of the orders you give have to be done by walking around the sub. While being able to walk around the sub is a nice feature, I much prefer having the option of being one-click away from any given station like the previous SH's. Basically this game plays almost like a first person shooter, however people who play FPS's will probably not get much enjoyment from a game where it takes minutes of real time to go from port to patrol area to actually sinking a ship (in other words it still tries to be a sim so it will not be fast paced enough for people who enjoy FPS's). The goal of trying to make this into an FPS/arcade game becomes apparent when you see the gaudy explosions and leaderboards which have been hacked by people on day 1 and show some people with a billion tons for their score.

On the plus side, the dynamic campaign is a nice feature and objectives are more well defined than previous silent hunters. Graphics for things other than explosions are also visually stunning. These are the only improvements I can think of and it's truly a shame as they show just how much promise this game had. Just like a hot blond, this game is great on looks but with very little substance and will leave you the second you lose that high paying job (internet conncetion).

A beautiful but broken simulation. This is a review of the game WITH the 1.1 patch applied.

It is a terrible shame when the new reviled Ubisoft online DRM actually works better than the game itself. Sadly after the somewhat brilliant Silent Hunter III and Silent Hunter IV, Silent Hunter V is a terrible let down. SH5 has been shipped in an incomplete state. It is very obvious the game has not been finished and missed a number of development milestones and was forced to market by the Ubisoft parent.

The graphics and sound can not be faulted. The look of the game is absolutely beautiful. But the intended audience of this simulation requires more than that. The engine that drives this game does not work. Some examples:

- In the port of Kiel ships regularly run aground with no ability to pathfind or avoid obstacles.
- Enemy destroyers will ram your sub and then jump out of the ocean.
- The ingame map screen - the most important part of the game - is missing vital features and information. When setting a plotted course if you deviate from the course there is no way to return to the plot without having to replot the entire course.
- There is no way to order urgent commands in the heat of battle. Simple commands like setting a course via a visual compass do not even exist in the game. In battle you need to go to the terrible map screen to order a course change using a new plot.
- Elements of the UI simply do not work and in some cases buttons lose their functionality requiring the simulation to be exited and restarted.
- The documentation that is supplied with SH5 is atrocious. There is no detail on how to set manual TDC actions. For anyone that has not played the earlier SH releases they will be totally confused.
- It is glaringly obvious no QA testing was performed when ships are running aground in the opening tutorial mission.

There are many more bugs and omissions but I feel there is no point in listing them. The icing on the cake is the dynamic campaign simply does not work. I feel Ubisoft should be punished for forcing the game to be released before it was finished and not even performing the most basic Quality Assurance on this title.


My final recommendation is: DO NOT buy this game until Ubisoft gives evidence they will actually completely finish development of this title.

Having been a games player since the early 80's, I have seldom been so disappoint in such an eagerly awaited title. Having played all the Silent Hunter series, I find this newest release to most disappointing. Of course the obvious is the extremely stupid DRM system they have chosen to institute requring a constant internet connection. I would have thought they would have learned after shooting themselves in the foot with the Starforce protection.
Equally as disappointing is the "dumbing" down of the overall simulation itself.There are ways to not use the aids, but the genral overall feeling is this is for the very casual player or the point and shoot set. Nothing wrong with that, but not in a supposedly serious simulator.
It has tons of eye candy,big explosions, and well rendered ship models. Very "Hollywood" in presentation, but after the gloss wears off you're left with a sim thats really Silent Hunter 3 with a few gimmmicks and a lot of heavy makeup.

I loved the Silent Hunter series and purchased each one as soon as it was released. THIS, however, is a piece of junk. I purchased it from GameStop without doing my homework. The person at the store saw the warning about having to always be online, and we both figured that was for multi-player gaming. SURELY they could not mean even as a single player, you'd have to be online. Well, SURELY we were wrong. UBI now takes the position that everyone is a thief, and by golly, the only way to prove it is to have you ask their servers if you can play. BUT, the fun doesn't stop there. TRY to play online, just try! I spent the whole weekend starting the game and then being booted off their servers, which left me with ... nothing. UBI blamed those pesky hackers (they blame EVERYTHING on hackers, as they will their dismal sales figures). But, even so, that's no excuse. You don't force your entire user base to phone home to their servers, and then not anticipate a high demand of use. This company is like the Keystone Cops.

Okay, the game itself... horrible! Completely unfinished. Graphics (on my high-end Mac Pro w/ Bootcamp) are choppy and jagged. The crew conversations are a joke and repetitive. You might depart from Kiel, but then find yourself off the coast of Africa for no reason at all. The crew says things like "Ship Sighted!" - WHILE YOU'RE UNDER WATER!!! That's even after installing the patch they sent out when the game was a day old. This game is not ready for prime time, and I'm not sure if it will ever be. I think UBI is desperately hoping the modding community will straighten out their mess.

After a couple of days of this BS, I took it back to GameStop. I thought I'd get an argument, but they said they were instructed to take back this particular game without question, so I got my $50 bucks back. Luckily, I have Silent Hunter 3 and 4, which is world's better than this piece of garbage. The Subsim platform has probably died with this release... at least it has with me. I will make sure UBI never gets any of my money.

Warning! This game is still in early beta stage. In addition to the poor DRM associated with it, the game is crippled with bugs, has poor performance and has less features than previous Silent Hunter titles.

Sub sim fans stay FAR AWAY from this game!

Pros:
Beautiful graphics
Excellent campaign design (mission-based or just tool-around the dynamic campaign map on your own)
Being able to walk through entire uboat, with animated crew in the various rooms

Cons:
Instead of building on the control schemes of Silent Hunter 3 (best, especially with GWX 3.0 Grey Wolves mod) or SH4 (almost as good) it seems the developers went back to some earlier code-base (losing some bug fixes from previous games even) and then put an iPod UI on instead, hoping to appeal to consumers who want "ease of use" over the consumers that want a simulator that immerses you into the feel of really commanding a uboat. For example, instead of being able to call out orders as the captain like "make your course 250" by clicking on the dial of a realistic looking compass, the captain must give his orders by plotting them on a map, or else by steering with the rudder left and right keys until the ship is on the desired course. In other words, the developers took things that weren't broken and "fixed" them to make the game more "approachable" and in so doing screwed it up for those who wanted to feel like "they were there".

There is also much untapped potential (e.g. you have a crew, but your interactions with them are limited to some repetitive personal conversations and asking them to use their special abilities. You *can't* ask them to perform any of their normal duties e.g. "report nearest sonar contact" - and there are no icons for most of those functions either.

Here's a list of issues I've noticed:
1) Torpedo props don't turn (was in SH3)
2) No animations etc. for reloading rear tube (there is an animation for front tube reloading which is cool)
3) Airplanes fly overhead many times (in 1939) but never attack or even circle you (unlike SH3/SH4)
4) Repetitive crew conversations - icon over head says "talk to me" on crew, but you keep having to do same conversations to get rid of it and see if there is something new to say
5) Unable to give "normal" commands to crew using conversation method e.g. "dive" or "report nearest contact"
6) Ships burn for days but don't sink (was problem in previous versions of game too)
7) Unable to maintain depth below 180m without significant forward speed on (bug in previous versions of game)
8) No animations of crew repairing damage, "firing" torpedoes, cranking valves when diving, running to front of boat when diving, etc.
9) No animations of crew eating
10) Don't appear to be any branching conversation trees (you can talk but there are few or no choices to respond differently as in an RPG)
11) Many dials/gauges don't work e.g. compass on bridge, meters in e-machine room (in SH3 with GWX there are working gauges everywhere)
12) Nobody throws levers in e-machine room or does any animation to start diesels
13) Nobody moves when I request the 1WO to initiate battlestations (apparently I'm unable to just yell "battlestations" myself)
14) Changed many default keys from sh3/sh4 for no good reason
15) Crew yelling "task force and it's a single unescorted merchant
16) Crew yelling "task force sighted" and I'm underwater
17) Crew yells "ship spotted" but don't say which direction
18) Filtering of funnels on tankers doesn't work correctly
19) Morale drops to zero when loading existing game
20) Crew won't follow orders when morale zero that they obviously would have in real life
21) Games when loaded have damaged ships healed, new weather, etc.
22) Minimal control over deck gun (e.g. aim at waterline, hold fire, at what range to fire)
23) After reporting status as no torpedoes or deck gun rounds left, ordered by BdU to stay on station (I will say that interactions with BdU are otherwise much better than in previous games, they actually order me to e.g. new patrol areas or RtB sometimes)
24) Seems like sometime when things happen while at TC>1, crew neglects to tell me until I happen to decide to reduce TC - which is bad if you are taking damage, for example.

Get mods at [...] and at least you can get working gauges and buttons to give common orders.

DRM was down Sunday and legit customers could not play.

UBI SOFT has lost their minds. Requiring to be connected to their servers to play a game you paid for is a whole new level of idiocy. I will be boycotting ALL UBI SOFT games until they stop this nonsense. DRM doesn't prevent piracy, is bad for the consumer, and does nothing but take your rights away. If I buy a game, I expect, NO I DEMAND to be able to play that game whenever I feel like it--not when UBI SOFT allows.

Screw UBI SOFT. BOYCOTT THIS NONSENSE.

To start with, this game isn't nearly as good as SH4 was. The walking around bit is an attempt to be just a little too cute, and there's a lot more of an "arcade" feel to the game. The controls are not very intuitive, and the manual is not a whole lot of help with it. There are unexplained crashes.

And then after all that, your net goes down, and you're not going to see a thing until it comes back. I've already returned the game as defective, due to both the bugs and the DRM (I had to chew a manager's ear off, they don't like it with opened software, but they did eventually accept the return. If they hadn't, they would've had a credit card charge dispute for defective product.)

I would strongly advise doing the same (return, chargeback as defective if they won't accept it) if you've already bought it, and if you haven't-stay with SH4, the gameplay was better and no net connection is required. Especially with the DRM system, this is the last Ubisoft game I'll even consider, and they'll be getting that one back soon.

Comments are made on a clean install with patch 1.1 and a registered, legally obtained product.

To start off, I started playing the Silent Hunter series when I was deployed to Iraq and a buddy gave me a cracked copy of Silent Hunter 3. I really enjoyed the game, and subsequently bought SH4 as soon as I got back to the states. I am extremely douptful that I would have ever tried a sub sim game (despite being a strategy PC gamer) were it not for the cracked version. I am not advocating piracy, but in my case they ultimately profited from it.

The DRM system is of course horrible but that's been talked about plenty already. I'll only say that it took me ten (+/-2) minutes to log on on two occasions with a very fast computer and internet connection. I don't know what caused it to be so slow then and not other times but it was aggravating to say the least.

As for game play, I found it to be shockingly lacking in several aspects. The thing that most aggravated me was the lack of any way to tell what degree your sub was turning when you weren't on a plotted course. In SH3 there was a simple little semi circle with a arrow pointing at the degree of turn you had ordered. Why they removed this is beyond me. Which leads to my next fault. How hard it is to do anything in your sub in a timely manner. They have removed or hidden the simple (well, at least easy to access)interfaces to steer, plot your own torpedoes, man the deck guns and others. Other issues i've encountered in only several hours of playing include aircraft being completely unable to find my submarine (not entirely a negative aspect for me!), allied ships crashing and sinking within sight of allied ports, game crashes and when I snuck into an enemy port, despite firing and hitting with all but two of my torpedoes, I was unable to destroy a single docked ship.

The crew management is a little goofy with you being able to turn a greenhorn into a veteran sub ace instantly if you have a handful of points to hand out.

Graphics are really good and a huge improvement over SH4. The water especially is very well done. Sound is also very good. I feel bad for the programmers who worked so hard on these aspects only to have it squandered by a release date deadline.

I will say that I have not spent a lot of time playing, but if there are ways to do the things i'm talking about I have had a hard time finding them. I hope that it's a failure on my part, but even so, this game needs a LOT of work before I would recommend it to anyone.

This game is a smelly sunken crapfest even without the most pathetic and invasive drm yet devised. Maybe the drm is actually a player aid trying to tell customers to 'look elsewhere for a worthwhile game' - if so, it succeeds admirably. SH5 is a significant step backwards from Silent Hunter III in every play mechanic. Even the in game avatars seem to be looking for a transfer from the kriegsmarine to the wehrmacht to escape from this sinking (and stinking) ubisoft franchise. Avoid at all costs! Abandon Ship - Abandon Ship!!!