I very much enjoyed Silent Hunter II, so I was very pleased when Silent Hunter III was recently released.
I walked through installation, but was disappointed to find I was required to install Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 (I’m still happy with 5) and Windows Media Player 9 for the documentation and ingame videos, respectively. I imagine Acrobat 7 is not really necessary, but I didn’t mess with it. The installation for WMP 9 failed because I do not have IE 6 installed, or so the Silent Hunter III installation claimed. I later installed WMP 9 manually and IE 6 was not necessary.
The game takes a while to install, and ships on a DVD. I am pleased to see more and more games ship on DVDs of late.
A word about starting the game. It loads slowly. Very slowly. Expect to use the bathroom or have tea before the main menu actually loads. It takes around a minute on my Athlon 1700+ XP box, running at 133MHz FSB with 1GB of RAM and an ATA/100 Western Digital 40GB disk with 2MB of cache. It actually reminds me of waiting for Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault’s menu to load on my machine. What’s wrong with a reasonable simple menu? A way to skip the introductions at the beginning might be nice, too. You can press a key, but I’d rather not have to. Anyway.
I immediately hopped into the MUSEM, where I noticed an unfortunate flaw. Scrolls on the list of ships and countries, the scroll wheel does not work and you cannot drag any portion of the scroll bar to speed the process. You must click individually each time you wish to scroll an entry. Very time consuming. Fortunately, I do not intend to spend much time engaged at the MUSEM.
The 3D models are impressive, although many of them remind me of the models in Silent Hunter II.
I wandered into the TRAINING menu, and began navigation training. The actual scenario loaded much faster than the game itself.
After attempting orient myself, I managed to crash dive the boat into the bottom, rose to periscope depth, recovered, then the game crashed. Excellent. The second attempt I nearly beached my boat before performing an emergency reverse and recovering. I completed navigation the second time without incident. Somewhat embarrassing.
I began the naval artillery training next. After some spirited discussion with my gun crew I finally ended up manning the deck gun myself. (I later learned the problem was the targets were marked as neutrals, so you have to jump through some hops to get the deck crew to fire.) The sound of it firing is scary and awe inspiring. My immediate reaction was to jump in my seat. Twenty rounds later, it still makes me wince. It sounds like a cannon. I’m not so sure I’m happy to be on the sending side, but pleased not to be on the receiving end. I skipped the secondary objectives and returned to the main menu to begin a career.
I am finding ingame a lot of usabilities which seem to be addressed in the v1.1 patch. It’s a shame this game seems to have shipped as a beta. I can confirm many of the listed issues, like the lack of shortcuts in the navigation screen, are a real pain. Navigation was so painless and easy in Silent Hunter II.