It’s funny how the market works. The popular FPS and RTS genres for example, are always seeing a flood of new releases, but often end up with rehashes or small adjustments on already-done formulas, or are just poorly-designed experiences that end up being over-hyped and ultimately lackluster. And yet, I find myself taking a closer look at the more niche markets, and end up asking why games like Freespace 2 or the average Mech sim weren’t blockbuster hits, when they were in themselves key examples of refinement and raw, unbridled quality. Admittedly this is something that’s been debated countless times throughout the ages (and most likely falls to the depressing fact that Joe Gamer will almost always choose a “pick-up-and-play” title over something that takes a bit of time to get into and fully understand), and yet even today we’re still seeing something of a market for these kinds of titles. IL-2: Sturmovik is a series that is still going strong, despite the odds, but one other example that has caught my eye is the latest addition to the venerable Silent Hunter series.

Silent Hunter IV: Wolves of the Pacific basically takes the existing framework from Silent Hunter III, throws on a new coat of paint, and then places the player into the American side of the Pacific theatre, fighting the Japanese navy right after the Pearl Harbor attack. But don’t mistake this for something as simple as a basic expansion or addon, as a surprising amount of effort has been made in putting forward a fresh feel to the game. There are a completely new set of submarines to choose from, for example, and the tutorial missions and interface have been revamped to be a great deal more ‘friendly’. In fact, there’s a much greater focus on simplicity and accessibility felt throughout the game in general, and this is to the extent where a quote from the development team was released indicating a push towards a more obvious, “action-oriented” box design to help draw in gamers. It’s no secret however that these kinds of decisions are often something that will send enthusiasts running for the hills after realizing the developers overcompensated a little (a phenomena becoming increasingly present at an alarming rate over the last few years), so I had an especial interest when digging in to Silent Hunter IV to examine these changes first-hand - but more importantly, to find out if Ubisoft had learned it's lesson from the not-so-perfect release of Silent Hunter III.

The most critical, core component to Silent Hunter IV of course is it’s undeniably alluring campaign mode. Like its predecessor, SHIV provides a dynamic, real-time campaign system that reacts to the players actions. While the player can only launch a limited number of sorties before they are automatically retired (an intentional design reflecting the average Captain’s career), it’s completely up to the player when they wish to return to base after accomplishing a given objective, and often it’s worthwhile instead to spend the extra time and effort hunting down extra ships to sink. Realism actually does play a key role in how this plays out, so while there is an initial option when starting a mission to either begin inside of the docks (and then be faced with the interesting challenge of navigating out), or just start off a little ways off-shore, anything beyond that requires the player to manually navigate to a given area – a process which often takes several game days. This is where a heavy reliance on time acceleration occurs, as well as your crew's skills at spotting enemy ships before they see you.

Much of this sounds similar to Silent Hunter III, but new to the sequel are a number of features. For one, the game now takes place in the Pacific theatre against Japan, enabling the player to participate conflicts around memorable areas like Pearl Harbor, Midway, and Wake Island. To help make things interesting, some time-based scripting has been thrown in to the campaign to ensure given events actually happen on realistic dates in real-time - and if you're hanging around those areas during that date, chances are you'll get to participate in the naval aspects of those battles. This is augmented by mission objectives that are given to the player throughout the campaign, which thankfully now involve much more than randomly patrolling designated zones. Sure, the patrol missions are still there, but now there are a number of interesting other quests too, like delivering a spy team to an enemy shoreline, or sneaking in to an enemy harbor and using your periscope to snap photos. Unfortunately, some of the issues seen in Silent Hunter III are stemming up again, as once more the campaign suffers from sometimes annoyingly vague mission instructions, or just plain broken scripting. Helpfully the game orients you in the right direction by giving a large, sizable icon for the exact area you’re supposed to go to, but I encountered a number of cases where I’d go into a patrol zone, cruise around for a number of game days, sink a few ships, and not have the objective clear successfully.

Unfortunately this is just the tip of the iceberg. As far as problems go, Silent Hunter IV is inundated with cases of unexpected behavior, scripting failures, blatant coding problems, and many cases of things just flat-out not working right. Ironically, the 1.1 patch that came out nary a few days after the game’s release fixed some of the more serious issues, yet actually introduced a new issue causing the game to crash any time the “A” key is pressed. After a bit of digging through the official forums to determine the cause for this, I found this apparently happens because the underlying command for ordering your sub to level out (such as during an aggressive dive) had changed after the patch, but the developers didn’t bother updating the associated key binding to reflect this – making the game simply crash any time the button is pushed. Okay, I can understand that mistakes are made every now and then and that we’re not all perfect, but what’s surprising is that no kind of “hot fix” for this issue has been put out yet, nor the majority of the game’s other problems addressed. To give an impression of how deep this runs, I’ll give a list of some of the more glaring issues: The “manual” torpedo targeting system (which is as satisfying to use as it is complicated – I had my own special victory dance any time I managed to score a hit using this in Silent Hunter III) is actually nearly useless because the system for calculating a ship’s speed doesn’t work properly, and while I’ve scored my own share of hits using the automatic approach, apparently that system is suffering some issues too. Taking damage to certain parts of your sub will cause your crew to be continually injured, even long after the damage is fixed. If, during a campaign, your home base is taken over by the enemy, you actually won’t be advised of where you should return home. The radar system is also just flat-out broken half the time, and refuses to work unless you meet some not-immediately-obvious criteria.

Hilariously, at least one aspect of the game that does seem to work right is the copy protection; anybody using a No-CD crack is being cursed with their bridge crew randomly turning into paper-thin, flat 2D sprites, who then begin saying random numbers non-stop for the duration of the player’s voyages. Although I might not be entirely accurate with this report, as I’ve seen at least two postings from people claiming to be legitimate users who are still encountering this issue, which frankly doesn’t surprise me at this point. There isn't even any real documentation on the different torpedo, equipment, or submarine types, requiring an unnecessary amount of guesswork from any player starting a new career if they aren't already excessively familiar with submarine warfare. When I take all of these issues into account, I really have to question if there actually was any kind of dedicated testing schedule for this game – and if so, why weren’t these glaring issues acted upon before release?