Incredibly slow frame-rates. Looks great, however it turns unplayable when things get busy.
I LOVE-HATE SILENT HUNTER IV
GRAPHICS:
When I first saw the ships that are in the museum included, my jaw literally dropped. Possibly the best rendered ships to date... Now as soon as you actually take your sub into action, things start to slow down, progressively.
SOUND:
Cool music, nice 3d sound.
GAMEPLAY:
The micro management required in the previous release has been practically done away with altogether. You can actually play this game and forget about the crew entirely. After all, why should a Captain tell seamen when to go to bed anyhow?
THEATER:
Naturally now you have to put up with very long trips from Hawaii to the action-areas. If the graphics issues were fixed and time-lapse actually worked without the very bad studder, the long trip wouldn’t be such a pain.
BUGS:
One that is truly annoying. The AA gun camera in the first subs is poorly located. When manning it part of the walls corresponding to the conning-tower block your view. So basically you need to depend on your NPC gunner... and no matter how good he is... you never get the same number of downed planes. If you want to do it right, you do it yourself! And that annoying wall WILL NOT LET YOU! Very frustrating.
Another annoyance. Seemingly interminable planes, that come out of nowhere, have seemingly unlimited range, no base or origin ship. They come at you, straight at you, even if you’re submerged at night! One after another, after another, after another!! I had to tweak the cfg file to work around this problem. So if you feel like chasing a carrier... forget following the planes... they have no base at all!
Silent Hunter IV has many issues that still need patching. In spite of the recent patch, the game is far under par. The incredibly slow graphic throughput is more than enough to make you want to sink your OWN sub, uninstall and wait for a year for Ubisoft to get their act together, live up to their standards and PATCH THIS up and down the board!
For now, I am disappointed, but have high hopes that this game will be fixed soon. It will be definitely the closest I would ever get to the real thing.