A game of decisions, educated guesses and one where you are the commander of a nuclear submarine! Set in the cold war era, the game features three campaigns and several mission scenarios in addition to a level editor where you choose your opponents, their numbers and difficulty.
The game has a ton of simulation aspects and nautical terminology, while still maintaining the fun of the game. For example, unless you read the game manual, the game assumes you know your
Hull Classification Symbols, like: SSN or SSBN which are the hull classification symbols for Nuclear submarines and Ballistic missiles submarines respectively.
In the game there are 3 factions: NATO, Soviet and Chinese. Every faction has it's own strengths, weaknesses and doctrines, for example NATO doctrine emphasizes the use of passive sonar while Soviet doctrine almost always have there sonars set to active search. Another example is that NATO submarines have wire-guided torpedoes, while Soviet ones don't.
When I started writing this post, I had only recently finished the first campaign. Set in 1984. In my initial profile that I played on I had chosen a Skipjack class SSN, which didn't work very well for me. The Skipjack main attractions are it's relatively high speed and it's six torpedo-tubes, it is not the best at stealth nor is it equipped with missile launching capabilities, which I found out the hard way. Halfway into my first campaign, I encountered a fast moving soviet replenishment fleet, consisting of tankers, tenders and is escorted by three destroyers. Due to my submarine's noise emissions being high, the soviets would almost always detect me whenever I enter combat, even from faraway, they would launch a
RPK-2 Vyuga (which is a torpedo launched using a missile) to cutoff my escape routes and snipe me from far away!
RPK-2 Vyuga, NATO reporting name: SS-N-15 Starfish.
Upon failing or succeeding a mission, you get to read what the world's opinion is on your actions or what is the general consequences of them.
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The start of the 1984 campaign.
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| Sinking enemy submarines. |
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| Stopping the enemy replenishments convoys. |
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| Outcome of defending the Transatlantic convoy's routes. |
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| Outcome of repeated missions being won. |
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Stopping the enemy replenishments convoys.
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Stopping enemy ships from sinking a friendly aircraft carrier.
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Stopping the enemy replenishments convoys.
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| Succesful insertion of Spec Ops in enemy port. |
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Nerve-racking incident, where I completed my objective but, sank before the last mission!
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| NATO victory. |
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| Bro. Bronson, back in the base for some RnR. |
The second Campaign, set in 1968 is harder and more limiting. You're only given smaller and weaker wire-guided torpedoes in addition to an older style of torpedoes which has more explosive payload in exchange for a lack of sensors and wire guidance. Oh and no missiles.. Which made neutralizing tenders' missions a lot harder. Against hostile submarines however, it was the opposite! I would rush to the enemy submarine's position and watch as they start to scuttle their subs with their own torpedoes. It happened a couple of times and was so satisfying. and in one incident, there was a Blue on Blue action, as the enemy submarines would target me and sink their friends by accident :)
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| Poor guy scuttled himself. |
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| Soviet subs having a bit of friendly fire. |
Part of the gameplay involves you analyzing signals and audio frequencies, in order to classify whether a particular signal is emitted from a hostile class of ships, an enemy submarine, a simple neutral merchant ship or a biologic sound!
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| The passive sonar detected a Blue whale, minding his business. |
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| A Humpback whale. |
In a sad incident, a Soviet submarine's torpedo guidance system targeted a whale, mistaken the poor guy for a NATO submarine :( Safe to say, justice was delivered swiftly as we sank the perpetrator.
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| MR. WHALE WATCH OUT! ! ! |
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| Bro had the air pods on. |
For the last campaign which was set in the year 2000 between the US and China, in the Chinese sea. Solid campaign with a beautiful
Seawolf-class submarine. Of course I named the save file Bro Bronson The 2nd. Bro had to continue the legacy of his dad.
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| Bro Bronson The 2nd. assigned as commander of the USS Seawolf. |
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| Land strike mission. |
Most fun I've had in a while, I absolutely recommend this game. At first I was afraid it was going to be too complicated and heavy on the simulation aspect but, I was pleasantly surprised with the game's arcade-like controls. 10/10 would sink by my own torps again.
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