If you want to be a submariner, ignore this game and join the Navy!
A true disappointment in every sense.
Graphics engine may have had an update since Silent Hunter 4 but thats about it. The designers thought they needed to add something new to the series by redesigning everything that was already wonderful about the game.
Gone is the easy to use and practical control interface, replaced by a UI which is as minimalistic as you can possibly get. Theres no compass, theres no rudder display, theres no Depth under Keel display. If you want to get anywhere on the u-boat you have to actually walk there manually through the compartments, this may seem fun at first and more realistic but after a few minutes it becomes pure frustration as you can't get to where you want to be fast enough to actually enjoy the game.
Example: To get to the deck gun, you have to walk through the compartments to the control room, go up 2 sets of ladders, open two hatches, step outside onto the conning tower, walk to the back of the tower and step down a ladder, walk along the side of the ship and then click ont he gun (there is no keyboard shortcut to get to it) and then when you do get to it, you are presented with a trully horrible targetting system - a green dotted line which gives no sense of range, if you enjoyed shotting at Merchant Ships with HE-Shells in SH3/4, then you won't be having any enjoyment from SH5.
The ocean floor looks like a picture of the bottom of a fish tank, the "actual" sea bottom is an invisible ledge 10m above the pictured bottom so sunken ships simply bounce off this invisible ledge and looks completely unrealistic.
There is only one training intro mission which teaches you nothing about how to use the u-boat and all it's systems (which have all been redesinged from previous versions so prior knowledge is useless)
The manual may aswell not have been included as it gives no practical information on how to use the new systems.
And I could go on listing many more faults ... suffice to say it's just a poor attempt at a game, the designers clearly spent so much time messing around with Ubisoft's DRM (which was cracked in 26 hours btw and is now irrelevant) that they forgot to actually design the game properly.
With regards to Graphics settings, these are very minimilistic, you are greeted by a set of slider bars for Gamma/AA/Texture however these sliders have no detailed display as to how much they are increasing so again another useless aspect.
All in all, a trully disappointing game and a waste of money, if you enjoy the series I would suggest you go back to SH3 and have some realistic fun.
What I will add is that the forums are full of nothing but complaints about the game so we can only hope that over the weeks/months the designers listen to the community and bring out some large scale patches to fix and add everything that is wrong with the game. Should they manage this and bring the same functionality from Sh3/4 and put it together with the Graphics potential of SH5, then we might have a good game.