Unfortunately, this is counterbalanced by a curious approach to damage modelling. The way thin skeins of water wash over the lens of your attack periscope, blurring the image, or the way you can see the waves swell as the bow of your U-boat crashes up and down in an ocean storm are fabulously realistic and genuinely impressive. For example, the graphical effects, particularly the water effects, are brilliant. Whilst the difficulty and the amount of aid can be scaled, Silent Hunter III seems to fall between the stools of “game” and “simulation”, with the potential to alienate both the more action-oriented audience and the simulation hardcore. The inclusion of external “free view” and event cameras, which allow you to track torpedoes and sinking ships, show off the beauty of the 3D engine and model detail, but also give you a totally unrealistic tactical advantage, should you choose to use them, turning a life and death battle of wits into a turkey shoot. Silent Hunter III is without doubt the prettiest naval simulation to date, and the developers seem determined to make the most of it, even at the expense of realism. This is undermined not only by the ability to play the Axel F Crazy Frog remix on a 1940’s gramophone, but also by an emphasis on what’s commonly called “the pretty”.
The purpose of simulation is to build a sense of atmosphere – to use realism in such a way to create the illusion that you’re actually a part of the situation being simulated. (Though there is something to be said for launching torpedoes at an oil tanker to the beat of “We Will Rock You”) To help pass the time there’s an onboard gramophone which acts as an MP3 player, allowing you to annihilate shipping to tunes as periodically authentic as Marlene Dietrich or as temporally inappropriate as Queen.
SILENT HUNTER 3 CREW MANAGEMENT MANUAL
That’s a lot of time to invest for very little of consequence, though it’s part of the inherent nature of simulation, and at least gives you time to peruse the manual (which is worryingly thin, given the complexity level of simulation present). With a typical war patrol lasting anything between twenty to eighty days of game time, despite having the ability to speed up time on the navigation map up to 1024 times, you can still be waiting over an hour (depending upon how lucky you are) until you make contact with a merchant convoy or naval ship. One thing Silent Hunter III requires, though, is patience, and lots of it. Silent Hunter III is definitely more simulation than game, though thankfully, it’s far from joyless.
If your gaming tastes veer more on the side of blitzkrieg than boredom, then you need to approach this title with as much caution as a U-Boat approaching an aircraft carrier task force.
SILENT HUNTER 3 CREW MANAGEMENT SIMULATOR
If you’re the kind of person who does five hour transatlantic crossings from Heathrow to La Guardia on Microsoft Flight Simulator in real-time, then you’re probably going to enjoy Silent Hunter III. Though, when you look at what submarining is, a gastric ulcer inducing combination of hours of tedium punctuated by scant seconds of sheer abject terror, you might not think that the above argument is particularly unbalanced. The shortest (and most disingenuous) answer is that the former is fun, and the latter is not.
There’s a long running argument in videogames journalism about what constitutes a “game” as opposed to a “simulation”.
0 kommentar(er)
