{"id":78137,"date":"2026-04-08T09:52:05","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T01:52:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=78137"},"modified":"2026-04-08T09:52:29","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T01:52:29","slug":"uboat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=78137","title":{"rendered":"UBOAT"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I like to try games of all genres such that I’d at least have a passing familiarity in them even if I’m never going to be an expert. One obvious lacuna in my ludography are military simulators. Well, here we have a submarine simulator that renders the German u-boats of World War II in such detail that you can walk around inside one in first-person view and press all of the buttons and switches yourself. It’s kind of insane and actually not as difficult to learn as I’d feared. I still didn’t spend that much time on it because it’s realistic enough that running a submarine in wartime is tedium most of the time, punctuated by brief moments of pure terror. But I sure enjoyed learning all about how submarines work and it is a very pretty game!<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The game lets you pop into the war at many different points in history, from right at the beginning in September 1939 to nearly the end in December 1945. This changes which port your submarine will be based out of and which missions you will be assigned. If you start near the beginning, you can opt to command the Type II U-boat but you’ll probably want to switch to the larger Type VII in short order. You get to customize a commander who is nominally you but in practice you’re in charge of the whole submarine and everyone in it. In port, you speak with your liaison to get assignments and visit the warehouse to load up on fuel, food, torpedoes and whatever else you need. You might also want to review the sailors under your command and decide who to take along. Then it’s off to sea to hunt your targets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is a modern game so the graphics naturally look great. You pan around your submarine to look at it from every angle, you can see your crew members crawling all over it, there’s weather effects and proper day\/night cycles, just amazing. But the real magic is that you can zoom in to get a cutaway view of the interior with every compartment modeled in full detail. Zoom in again and you switch to a first-person view letting you walk around the submarine yourself and fiddle with all of the dials and switches. It’s astonishing and it made me feel like the submarine is a toy that I can play with any way I want. All of the controls are functional so yes, you can really fire a torpedo by setting all of the dials correctly and pulling a lever. You can sit in front of the hydrophone to listen for the sound of ships’ propellers. When you issue an order such as turning on the air compressor, a sailor needs to go to the machine to switch it on and you can watch him doing that. It makes the submarine feel viscerally real down to the individual bunks and the cans of food on the stove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The game includes a decent set of tutorials to get you up to speed on how to manage a submarine. But really what helps the most that it offers a whole suite of options on how realistic you want the simulation to be. At the easiest end, it can be set up almost like an arcade game played mostly through the map where you can just click on UI buttons and your sailors will get things done. At the hardcore end, there are no markers on the map as this was before GPS after all so you need to use tools like rulers, protractors and draw lines on the map to navigate and work out an intercept course towards detected enemy ships. You’ll also have to use the onboard torpedo data computer to work out the correct torpedo solutions by feeding it the data on the enemy ship’s speed, distance and bearing. There are also settings for how alert enemy ships are in finding you, for how reliable your torpedoes are, even for how dark the nights are. All of these options greatly change the difficulty of the game and can be changed at any time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The admiralty will send you out on a variety of different missions that form part of a larger campaign. But your main goal that you will return to time and again is to sink enemy freighters. It can be satisfying to come across an unsuspecting cruiser and sink it with a salvo of torpedoes but that doesn’t progress the campaign goals and you’re not really rewarded for it. If you’re lucky, especially in the beginning stages of the war, you might come across a lone British freighter that is a sitting duck. More often however you have to engage a whole convoy of freighters that are protected by escorts. That’s a classic U-boat scenario of sneaking in close enough to the convoy to fire torpedoes at multiple ships, then trying your best to slip away from the escorts. Other mission types include delivering a spy to a given location without being detected or supporting a land invasion by escorting the troop ships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless of your chosen difficulty level, this game will teach you the essentials of how submarines work. That they run on diesel engines while on the surface and on electric engines while underwater for example, that they need compressed air to rise again after diving which must be recharged on the surface, that in the era before the invention of radar, the best way to detect ships from a long distance is to dive and use the hydrophone and so on. It teaches tactical lessons too. For one thing, you want your submarines to be operating on the surface most of the time. They’re too slow underwater and have a hard time catching up with even freighters sometimes so you don’t want to dive unless you really need to. Attacking at night is great because submarines are hard to spot in the dark even when not submerged. When you do get spotted, hugging the seabed can help confuse enemies using sonar to find you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It’s all very satisfying to play out the first few times. But as the old hands at war always say, war is tedium most of the time. You’ll be playing at high time compression rates while cruising across the ocean waiting for something to happen. Once you set the crew management schedule according to your preferences, the submarine largely runs itself just fine. Later you’ll get more experienced at methodically taking a convoy apart if it’s undefended, or peeling off freighters one by one if it is. Then it’s just a matter of repeating the same actions over and over again. I understand that the game gets much harder later in the war as the Allies develop better technology to counter the u-boat threat. You do get better gear of your own from headquarters but it won’t make up the difference. Even so, I didn’t feel like the game is compelling enough to make me play through the entire war. The campaigns are all scripted anyway and the missions fixed. You can’t change the outcome of the war and no matter how many British warships you sink, more will just spawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A real hardcore fan might not only want to play through every campaign of the war and do so with the realism set to maximum. This is certainly the game for them. For my part, even dipping my toes in like this is enough for me. I learned a whole lot about how the u-boats of the era worked, had a satisfying time hunting down ships and felt real terror hunkering in the deeps with depth charges going off around me and not really being able to do anything about it. Heck, I even managed to down a plane with the flak gun. Once. It was well worth the time and the purchase price and now I can mark it off my bucket list that I played a realistic submarine simulator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I like to try games of all genres such that I’d at least have a passing familiarity in them even if I’m never going to be an expert. One obvious lacuna in my ludography are military simulators. Well, here we have a submarine simulator that renders the German u-boats of World War II in such … Continue reading UBOAT<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78137"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78388,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78137\/revisions\/78388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}