Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic Video Game for PC Review

The Silent Hunter series is a long running development by Ubisoft in which you control submarines as they silently move their way through famous battles. In Silent Hunter 5, for the first time players can actually take the role of a submarine captain in the first person, so the action is more like real life than ever before.

Storyline

In Silent Hunter 5, you play the role of the captain of a German type VII U-boat whose goal is to destroy the ships of the Allied Powers within the Atlantic and Mediterranean sea. A storyline develops for the first time in the series as you control the captain as he tries to bring courage to his men who are fighting for Germany. Playing as the Germans can be a fun twist to the usual good versus evil style of most games.

Graphics

The graphics of the game are one of the best features. The visuals are crisp and clean and every inch of the game has new impressive graphical features added. Rain drops cloud your periscope as you look in it on a rainy day, cannon fire and explosions are rendered realistically and gives you all the satisfaction you could want, and background features such as distant mountains are beautiful, giving the game a wholesome feel.

Gameplay

In the game, battles are very strategic. You control your submarine as you explore new waters, trying not to be detected. A new map shows your radius of detection: the faster you go, the bigger the radius, so slowing down will help you become virtually invisible. The best way to destroy units is to circle silently behind them and blast them with a torpedo. Do do this, Ubisoft now allows you to look at enemy units through your periscope and target at the same time. Ubisoft also has made hitting moving targets easier, which takes some of the frustration out of the game. Besides actual warfare, you can also walk around your U-boat (a new feature for the series) and talk to your crew. They will have their own characters and demonstrate their fear and anxiousness. It's a fun feature that gives you something different to do now and then.

DRM Play

To the outrage of many fans, SIlent Hunter 5 has come out as a completely online game, which means no offline play or installation onto your computer. Ubisoft made this decision to cut down on pirated copies of the game. Unfortunately, this makes playing difficult for gamers with bad internet connections and makes gaming impossible when the server crashes. A few hours after its release, a hack was released by hackers as torrents which allowed players to play part of the game offline. All in all, gamers agree that this online feature is the weakest aspect of the game and hope that Ubisoft will go back to disc gaming in the future.

Silent Hunter 5 is a good game with some bad online problems. However, if you have an excellent internet connection it's a great way to spend some time. People who reviewed it without taking the internet problems into consideration gave it a 7-8/10.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hunter_5