Brilliant and broken – possibly the two best words to describe the unpolished gem that is Silent Hunter 4. There’s so much to like about Silent Hunter 4 that flaws which, in a mediocre game could easily be ignored, have their intensity magnified precisely simply because they contrast so much with the brilliance that is the rest of the game.

It’s a crying shame, because Silent Hunter 4 is, in effect, a time machine. Not just back to the days of 1942-45, but to the halcyon days of the late 80s to the early 90s, when simulation gaming was king for PC. Long before introspection, rivet counting and ever-tightening budgets forced simulations from the metaphorical radar, simulations like SH4 were a common sight; immersive, engaging, and unafraid to assume their audience was endowed with a modicum of both intelligence and patience. Silent Hunter 4 is, in many ways, a game from a different time.

Unlike the previous iteration in the Silent Hunter franchise, the universally acclaimed Silent Hunter 3, 4 moves the action from German U-Boats in the Atlantic to US submarines in the Pacific. Given the intended market for this type of simulation, one can only assume that this is a very shrewd move from Ubisoft. Fortunately, the change in setting works. SH4 conveys the feeling of the Pacific theatre just as well as SH3 captured the feel of the Atlantic. From sunny days with crystal clear water common in the south Pacific, to the frigid waters and frequent typhoons that are native to the north of Japan, SH4 has it all down perfectly.

For anyone familiar with Silent Hunter 3, SH4 will immediately seem very familiar; the essence of the game is unchanged. You perform the role of virtual skipper of one of a plethora of different realistically modelled US submarines. Upon leaving port, you are given an objective and pretty much left to wage war in the Pacific as you see fit - in a dynamic, immersive and persistent universe.

Unlike SH3, though, the dynamic engine isn’t expected to provide all the action for the player; far from the “patrol grid reference X” missions and lack of interactiveness prevalent in the last game, SH4 has a variety of unique missions which are assigned to the player. One patrol might have you hunting for shipping in a particular location, but others will have you covertly inserting special agents behind enemy lines, performing the role of lifeguard and retrieving downed airmen, to sneaking into harbours at the heart of the enemy’s war machine to snap a few pictures of ships in port. Contact with COMSUBPAC (your headquarters) is actually interactive and may influence how patrols play out.

These missions really make you feel part of an overall war effort, not just a lone Rambo out to win the war single-handedly. For instance, shadowing a convoy and then sneaking away and surfacing the boat to send a contact report may result in being told to eschew the merchants in favour of the escorts, in order to give other boats a turkey shoot at the hapless merchants. It’s touches like these that really put you there, in the hot seat of a submarine thousands of kilometres from home in direct and deadly contact with the enemy.

Suspension of disbelief; that state where you forget where you really are, and you’re dragged into a different world. In our opinion, it’s the factor that makes or breaks a simulation. Fortunately for you and us, it’s one thing that SH4 has in spades. Days spent crossing the Pacific (albeit only minutes on 8000x time compression) really feels like the odyssey it really was; the thrill of entering enemy waters and spotting your first contact really get the blood going. SH4 really captures the essence of tense submarine warfare: one minute you’re the careful patient hunter, shadowing a convoy of juicy merchant shipping before leaping in for the kill; the next moment you’re the hunted, as the escorts spot you and you’re forced to go deep and silent.

This latter part of the experience is perhaps the most tense of the game; the “ping”....”ping” of the escort’s ASDIC, the roar of the propellers as the destroyer crosses overhead, the wait for the inevitable explosions as the depth charges rain down around you; these things produce an atmosphere that’s among the most edge-of-the-seat exciting that we’ve come across in gaming. It’s not a contrived experience, and it makes the typical “monster closets” and “girl-with-supernatural-powers-and-long-hair” scripted set-pieces of typical games seem somewhat forced and laughable in comparison.

Sadly, there are several other factors which provide the exact opposite experience, and drag you, kicking and screaming, back into the real world and the realisation that you are, in fact, playing a computer simulation. At the time of review, patch 1.2 had been released, and the overall assessment of the simulation was made with this patch. Sadly, even after two patches the game is as riddled with bugs. For instance, crossing the dateline from Pearl Harbour irretrievably breaks a plethora of your instrumentation and functionality of your sub. Mounting a twin AA gun on certain subs results in an unusable AA defence, as the superstructure obscures the majority of the traverse of the weapon. Crashes to desktop are relatively common, and somehow the tools which you use to plot solutions in order to make a successful torpedo attack (provided you’ve chosen to do so manually) are still irretrievably broken.
The game smacks of insufficient testing before release, and a hurried slew of inadequately tested patches. To give you an idea of the state of the game in its unpatched state, the key ‘A’ or ‘level the boat’ – a relatively common command – would, in version 1.0, crash the game to desktop - every time. How such a massive and glaring error made it through testing speaks volumes about the amount of testing this game actually received.

Silent Hunter 4 is a massively immersive simulation of submarine combat in the Pacific theatre of World War II. It’s eminently scalable in complexity and difficulty, rewarding both those that want quick action and those prepared to be more patient. However, in its present state it’s a massively flawed gem. Bugs ruin the sense of immersion and will try the patience of even the most dedicated sim fan.
We therefore have two pieces of advice: if you’re a sim-head who wistfully remembers the heady days of simulation in the 1980s and 90s, rush out and buy this immediately. Thank us later. If, however, you’re a novice to sim-land but are nevertheless intrigued by the subject matter, we recommend following the status of patches to SH4 before buying. It’s a crying shame, but in its present state it’ll probably just put you off. If, as we believe, after a couple more patches the bugs can be ironed out of SH4 it will become, without doubt, the sim to have in your collection.