Sometimes software is released in such a wretched state that the developers may as well just come to your house and kick your dog for $40. This is the case with Destroyer Command, a painful instance of just how shameless and insulting a computer game company can be with its customers.

Near miss by a kamikaze.

Destroyer Command is the spiritual heir to all those Great Naval Battle games SSI used to publish. You command a ship (or ships, in some cases) from either an overhead map view or by jumping around the various stations, where you flip switches, twiddle dials, and look at gauges. But whereas the Great Naval Battles series put you on the bridges of the century's grandest battleships, Destroyer Command relegates you to their little cousins, the destroyer escorts in World War II who kept enemy subs at bay. While this might seem like a less glamorous command, it does open the game to antisubmarine warfare, a topic that hasn't been covered in a sim since Novalogic's 1990 game Wolfpack. It also means you'll get to use torpedo launchers, which were the real teeth of destroyers in that era. Since you usually have to get in close to fire torpedoes, using them requires more finesse than simply plugging away with your 5-inch guns.

The developers at Ultimation created this sim as a companion to last year's Silent Hunter II, a submarine sim that was supposed to be "interoperational" with Destroyer Command. What this means is that you can link them together and play multiplayer games in which some players drive subs and some players drive destroyers. At least that's how the theory goes. As of two weeks after the game's release, there's no support for "interoperation" and no official word on when a patch will be available. Considering how long the deeply flawed Silent Hunter II has remained unpatched (five months and counting), this doesn't bode well. Note that this didn't stop Ubi Soft from advertising this feature on its Web site, on the game box, and in the manual. "One of the most exciting features of Destroyer Command is the ability to play cooperatively or head-to-head against other Destroy Command or Silent Hunter II owners," the manual states optimistically. There isn't even a correction for this in the readme file.

There is multiplayer support for destroyer-only games. Since real engagements can last hours, the time compression works by selecting the slowest speed chosen by all the players, which lets the boring stretches speed past at whatever pace players choose. You can play deathmatches, cooperative missions against computer-controlled vessels, and even base-capture games. While these work well enough over a LAN, Destroyer Command repeatedly drops out of sync and crashes when played over Ubi Soft's online matching service, ubi.com.

The game is almost entirely playable from this screen.

The single-player game consists mainly of two campaigns, each a linear set of about 20 canned missions. Because Hitler's surface navy was quickly defeated, the Atlantic campaign should have been mainly sub hunting, but Destroyer Command goes out of its way to put you in the middle of surface battles against German raiders and even Italian ships in the Mediterranean. The far more interesting campaign is set in the Pacific, where you get to participate in historical highlights like "running the slot" to Guadalcanal, covering MacArthur's triumphant return to the Philippines, and even a late-war drive on Japan itself. At one point, you help kick the Japanese off an island at the tip of Alaska, a completely inconsequential exchange of land notable as the only time foreign troops have seized American territory. There are a couple of attempts at carrier battles, arguably the deciding factors in the war against Japan, but Destroyer Command presents these epic struggles with all the accuracy and grandeur of a third-grade Thanksgiving pageant. You can set up epic naval encounters by using the custom mission generator, which lets you throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Unfortunately, there's no random generator, so you always know exactly what you're facing before you ever see it on the map.

Because the challenge of submarine warfare is the uncertainty of being hidden underwater, Ultimation's submarine sim Silent Hunter II suffered greatly from its canned missions. During the inevitable replays, knowing exactly what you would be facing and where it would be located killed the thrill of the hunt. But this isn't so much a problem with surface warfare, where the challenge is maneuvering into position once you've made contact. In a way, Destroyer Command plays like a wargame, and the scenarios are like set-piece battles in which you have to figure out the best tactics. There are still plenty of aggravating situations when you have to repeatedly replay a mission to accomplish some objective, but it doesn't drag the game down as much as it did in Silent Hunter II.