Dexter

March 21, 2007 - Two years ago, Ubisoft renewed our faith in the simulation genre with an absolutely first-class submarine sim called Silent Hunter III. Focusing on the North Atlantic-based shenanigans of Germany's U-boats, it managed to balance a high level of realism with a surprisingly high level of accessibility. Better yet, it did all this within the context of brilliant graphics and a phenomenally engaging campaign. Now the designers have taken the same ideas and used them to treat submarine warfare in the Pacific. The resulting title, Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific, is every bit as good as the previous game. Though it's not without its problems, it's a sure bet for fans of undersea action. The submarine commander has a number of tasks before him. Not only is he in charge of setting the overall route of patrol, but he also has to consider how and where to attack the enemy and how to get out of danger once before he's discovered. Maintaining the element of surprise and using your weapons to their greatest effectiveness constitute the most thrilling portions of the game. Lengthy journeys between targets is a considerably less dramatic but no less important part of the job.


First, you have to determine where to patrol in order to find enemy ships. In some cases, you might be sent radio messages from your headquarters that give you a rough idea of where enemy convoys have been sighted. In other cases, you may simply have a hunch that ships will traveling along a certain route based on where the enemy's bases are. In still other cases, you may just stumble upon an enemy by pure chance, either through radar contact or actually seeing a ship on the horizon. After taking on a series of short tutorials that get you up and running with the main systems on your submarine, you'll be prepared to take on the enemy in the campaign or in a number of solo missions. But while the game outlines the basics of firing torpedoes or manning the AA guns, players who want to know more about the more sim-heavy options of plotting firing solutions will have to seek the information on their own.
In any case, the focus here isn't on protractors and stopwatches. The real point of the game is to put you in the shoes of a sub commander and force you to make the decisions about how you're going to engage the enemy rather than how to operate each individual station. Sure, those elements are present for players who want to enjoy them, but Wolves of the Pacific is more about the experience of being a sub commander than it is about the nuts and bolts of submarine operation.


Silent Hunter III offered a much more open-ended campaign than we saw in Silent Hunter II, and Wolves of the Pacific continues this trend. Rather than relying on scripted progress, events here unfold across the course of the entire war. There are some watershed moments that can't be missed but you're largely free to succeed and fail as you will. Some missions, like sneaking into Tokyo Bay to snap a few pictures, are relatively easy. Others, like trying to attack shipping in a heavily patrolled zone, are much more difficult. It's a fact that submarines are the predatory bullies of the sea, taking on defenseless merchants and tankers (or god help them, even sampans), while running from fights with tougher opponents like destroyers and cruisers. Still, the wily submarine captain can sometimes seize an opportunity to take out a much stronger target, like a carrier or a battleship. The trouble is, these guys never travel without serious backup and you can quickly find yourself outnumbered. The AI here is just as aggressive as it was in Silent Hunter III, so if you bite off more than you can chew, you'll quickly be surrounded by depth charges and dive bombers.



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