First game to keep me up playing all night in decades. + Awesome presentation, graphics capture all weathers and seasons at sea so well, best I've ever seen. Submersible models are detailed and accurate (and fully interactive) + Fully featured and I mean fully featured. You can pull the launch levers yourself on the tubes if you want, or more likely have an officer at the TDC to launch them from there, you can be that officer, or be the captain and just tell everyone what to do. You can enter the recorded data in the TDC yourself if you're comfortable with the trigonometry and scale conversions or you can let your crew do the difficult stuff all the way from easy arcade game style to manual everything hardcore and everything in between. Full open world career for the entire duration of the war in Europe, manage your crew with uniforms, task schedules, experience and special abilities, food, moral, stress etc... seriously for WW2 German submersible experience there are no gaps. Very impressive set of complex gaming systems combined. + Patches are still incoming, developers appear to care about supporting their product. - Merchant ship variety a little low means recognition is not at all challenging. - Few weird bugs and design issues - cannot use the ladder on the port side of the conning tower nor can you pass by on this side. Crew ai sometimes gets stuck. Crashes occasionally. Stutters from background loading can get really significant in high traffic zones. Would be a definite 5/5 if those things get improved with patches. If you loved the Silent Hunter series and struggled to find something to scratch that itch since SH4 like me, you will love this game. It's got it's own idiosyncracies and odd behaviour, slightly janky animations etc. but I think this type of simulator really has to be a masssive technical challenge considering all the different sorts of gaming systems that need to be combined in a cohesive whole. And they've done it really well.
