A beautiful sub game but that's about as far as it goes with Silent Hunter 5.
First, you will need to be connected to the internet to play the game which is not good because it alienates some people with either pore or no connections from playing.
Secondly, its obvious they have tried to taylor this new edition towards casual gamers meaning people that dont play sims much to broaden their market. Big mistake imho. If you dumb down a sim enough you get what, arcade? And thats what we have here boys and girls health bars and all.
The campaign starts out with the historical invasion of Poland in 1939 and progresses from there. You are treated to a sub pen level after the tutorial mission where you can walk around viewing all the non historical German flags and men working and of course your U-Boat or you can talk to the commander for a mission plot. These missions are your standard SH missions except they are dialoged instead of a note pad journal from past games. From here you can choose to set off on your own patrol or follow a mission by a certain date.
SH 5 has a limited interface now. You have some of the original functions such as the hot keys for dive, silent running, surface, periscope depth, etc. and the world map is kind of innovative to a certain degree where you can click a radio button to ignore friendly ships and land masses when advancing time but that's it. This is a good thing however, using the map easily is another question. For example, I couldn't locate the "set plotted course" button which was present in past games. I eventually found a similar command by right clicking on a waypoint that would set your course. There is no more quick station interface icons except for go to periscope and bridge so you will need to manually move to lets say the deck gun or flak gun to man them.
Navigating through your U-Boat takes extreme patience since my charactor kept getting stuck on invisible walls and other objects including the men onboard. I did find that now you can fully navigate the top deck of your U-Boat meaning you can walk around anywhere from bow to port even in bad weather and high waves. And if you hold in the shift key (by default) while moving forward you can go faster but not by much.
Back to the main campaign. The missions are mostly wide open with the exception of completing objectives in a set time and tonage that was present in the past games of the series. However, as many have mentioned here the AI is well, not very smart. Mostly the Merchants will just keep on course even when you torpedo them or surface and no zig-zag patterns were observed. The destroyers are aggresive as they should be but seem to just circle you rather than actually engaging you with depth charges or their big guns.
The graphics are the only thing I see that can be praised here. They are beautiful with sunsets-rises so detailed that they make you smile. The water looks great much like what I've seem in other games such as Crysis but what good is eye candy when the game play suffers from can I say consolitis? Yes, I know this is PC excusive game but SH 5 feels more like Im playing a XBox game than a PC sub simulator which is a shame.
Performance seems mostly stable on my mid range system (specs are below) on the highest settings (everything maxed including resolution for a 22" wide screen monitor) except for the occasional slow down when using the time compression feature and when in ports with lots of ship traffic.
Environmental sounds are decent as well as is the German dialog included and it gives the game a more authenic feel to it but thats about it. I bought the retail version and I have heard that the Steam version doesn't include the German dialog.
There is AA this time that was missing from SH 4 but was later added in a patch. However, as one reviewer mentioned here there is no scale settings other than a slider bar. I understand how AA works fortunately as it usually starts with 2x and goes up by two's to usually 16x but for someone new to PC gaming this might be a slight problem.
Voice overs are passable however, they repeat often and I found no way to turn them off in the options menu. Comments such as "Were in shallow water, captain" repeat over and over not just when advancing time but in real time.
Other features include the standard historical missions such as a attack on a convoy near Malta, one near Iceland, a supply convoy headed for Russia which looked interesting and a blockade of the Strait of Gibraltar. There are total of about 7 or 8 give or take of these historical missions to play. There is also a ship encyclopedia for viewing pleasure.
There is a multiplayer element here as well but I found no one playing to date. I assume either few people bought this game due to the DRM scheme or they are just playing the single player portion of the game right now but I was unable to find a match either way.
And U-Play is not something I have kind words for right now after buying "Wings of Prey" last December and not being able to play the game due to technical issues due to the tons of patches they released when it was in Beta and found it all inconvenient to say the least.
Overall, Silent Hunter 5 all about presentation but when you look deeper into the game it becomes a watered down sim and races towards the arcade spectrum. Yes, it looks and smells like a Silent Hunter game but it tastes like... well, you know.
Intel 2.67 ghz Core 2 Duo
Nvidia GF 275 896 MB
WIn 7 32 Bit
4 G RAM