Only a 7.7? Enigma deserves more than just a 7.7! Hell, I give it a 9.1!

User Rating: 9.1 | Enigma: Rising Tide PC
Yeah, good naval sims are hard to come by. Silent Hunter II was a letdown, incredibly long missions (though cut short by the simulation godsend known as time compression), no open-ended gameplay, et cetera. Destroyer Command was awful, and as GameSpot put it, full of broken features (And I did laugh at the "plow into everything" bit they wrote). Hell, they were actually the only two naval sims I had at the time. Needless to say, I was disappointed. So there I was, ambling through the electronics department of Wal-Mart, when suddenly out of the blue, the game's box caught my eye. I was interested, so I went ahead and bought it, thinking this might be another waste of my time. Boy, was I wrong.

The game ran decently well on a Intel Celeron D 2.8Ghz processor, 256 MB RAM and a GeForce 4 MX4000 64 MB PCI video card. Apart from the excruciatingly long load times, that is. I fired up the first training mission and found myself rather impressed, and the immediate blaring of alarms startled me as I noticed a convoy of ships on the horizon. Which is another good thing, damn good draw distance, it's realistic! Granted, everything looked pretty damn low-res when I played it, but it still looked good.

The presentation is very well done. Although some of the missions are dark and the ships' details are hard to make out, everything looks detailed. Explosions are purty, smoke effects be purty.

Gameplay? Purty. As Scott Osborne stated, dodging ships and airplanes, diving (and crash diving, which is essentially a very sped-up dive command, done in real life when there was no time for a standard diving procedure), raising the periscope and moving to a safer location, it is a blast.

The sound is "eh." All the the flak guns, anti-air machine guns, main guns, and explosions sound the same. I would have given it a 10 if there were more of a variety, I mean, you can tell the difference between artillery and an anti-tank weapon, right?

Enigma's a great game for both casual and serious gamers. I'm a mix of both, since I tend to get bored with overly-complicated sims. But hey, I'm not perfect, right? Point is, this game rocks, it's a worthy game, the voice recognition is a kickass addition, and everyone needs to get this game.