Game: Steel Diver

Platform: 3DS

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo

ESRB: E

Genre: Sub piloting “action” game

Players: 1-2

What's Hot: Dynamic backgrounds are well done, periscope game enjoyable in small doses

What's Not: Missions are tedious, game offers little challenge, strategic competitive mode based mostly on luck

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Review by: Brandon "One ping" Cackowski-Schnell

If you watched some of the tense, submarine based dramas of the 90’s, movies like Hunt For the Red October, Crimson Tide and U-571, you would think that submarine combat was a tense, gripping affair where steel behemoths played a dangerous game of chess where one errant strike meant a watery grave. The developers of Steel Diver should have watched those movies. Maybe if they had, their game would have some of the tense excitement of underwater combat and not the plodding experience of navigating a sub through undersea tubes until the next opportunity to surface comes along.

You’re a sub captain and it’s your job to pilot one of three submarines through various undersea courses until you either fight a giant cephalopod or surface in some random section of water. Along the way you’ll be attacked by ships, other submarines and floating rocks as they all try and stop you from doing, I don’t know, surfacing? The game is controlled completely through the use of manipulating levers that raise and lower your sub as well as control forward and backward motion. There’s also a wheel to control pitch and yaw in case you want to float through the ocean completely diagonally for a change of pace.

Each mission has three subs to choose from of various sizes and abilities. The bigger the sub the harder it is to navigate, but what you lose in maneuverability you gain in extra ordinance. All subs have the ability to mask their appearance from heat seeking torpedoes and all subs have the ability to completely regenerate health by surfacing. It’s an interesting idea, but in practice the game offers virtually no challenge or fear of failure. Enemy subs and ships that you pass on your way to your goal never come after you and your sub can take a tremendous amount of damage so you can survive most encounters by sailing past, taking whatever hits come your way and then surfacing when it’s convenient.

Oh sure, you can fight your way past your enemies, but with the extremely sluggish speed of your torpedoes and the lack of any need to fight, there’s not much of a point to it, which makes the boss battle encounters a longwinded and boring lot. You’ll spend the entirety of the encounter fiddling with the levers until you get your sub in the exact right position to fire, just to see your enemy change position as your torpedo was about to hit. Your enemies will fight back, albeit rarely, but you can either get out of their way easily or weather their attack and head to the surface to regain health. Even with the plodding nature of the missions, with only eight missions to undertake, even when taking every sub out for each mission you’ll be done with the campaign in three to four hours. Sure, you can go back and undertake the missions as time trials but if they weren’t fun with a timer, they sure aren’t going to be with one.

One small area of interest in the game comes after each mission when the game shifts to a periscope view and you’re tasked with sinking enemy ships. You can either spin in real space to find your targets or use the dials on the display to move your scope. Score a direct hit and you’ll down a ship in one hit, a tricky task giving how much you need to lead some of the speedier vessels. Decals are awarded based on how many ships you take down and applying these decals to your subs in the campaign gives them extra health or better weapons. Unfortunately each decal requires you to have a differing decal minimum to be effective making even the enjoyable part of this game a chore. The periscope mode is available outside of the campaign however it loses its appeal over the long haul.

Finally, if you have a friend who also has a hankering for submarine combat, there’s Steel Commander, a two player strategy game that has you each trying to ferret out the other’s fleet and destroy it, Battleship style. Ships are places on a hexagonal grid and during each turn you can either move a ship or your sub to either defend against the enemy sub or sink your enemy’s forces. As a sub, if you come across an enemy vessel you’ll have to pick a depth to dive to in order to avoid the depth charges, as as ship, you set the depth to drop the depth charge. Hardly the stuff of legendary oceanic encounters. As a ship, avoiding the attacks of the enemy submarine seemed next to impossible and as the guide for the game only available in the game, stopping the game to read the manual will probably result in you ceasing to do both. You can play the game against the AI should you need to however either against a player or the computer, the game feels like it’s based completely on who is lucky enough to stumble across the other fleet first.

Steel Diver is a very odd choice as a launch game. It’s a new IP, which is great, but it doesn’t exactly scream mass appeal. The 3D is used effectively, making it look like you’re peering into a fish tank, complete with beautifully done dynamic backgrounds, but you can also turn it off and not have the experience change much at all. Mostly though, the biggest problem is that it’s short, dull and entirely too easy. While any one of those would cause the game to spring a leak, all three sinks it right to the bottom.

Brandon Cackowski-Schnell is a regular contributor to GameShark and is the cohost of Jumping the Shark , GameShark.com's official podcast and co-founder of No High Scores.

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