22:35 - somewhere on the edge of grid AM34. Peaceful Scotch waters ripple past at 10 knots. The sky is painted a dazzling peach hue as the sun hides itself over the horizon. My men play cards in their quarters and Kesler cooks the musty smell of potato into the air of U-47, wafting past me out of the conning tower and into the evening. All’s well, as seadogs say. I tap out my pipe and climb down from the bridge into the command room…sidle up to my navigator to review our course, and then ALARM! The cry from the bridge sends crew from the stern quarters scrambling to the bow torpedo compartment. U-47 pitches into a steep dive at flank speed and she slices down into 30 meters of black salty wash. Fifteen seconds later a Hurricane drops a depth charge on her wake, sending a shudder through the boat. We have been spared once again, by the cold and indifferent embrace of our friend, our nemesis, the Atlantic.

Silent Hunter 3 is a serious U-boat simulation set during the battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War. While you might be able to dredge up screenshots that show my boat lunging out of the water and onto the deck of a small merchant ship, pushing it over and down, effectively drowning the helpless sow, they would be from my boyish days as a Kriegsmariner when there were no consequences and it was all about maniac bravery, savage close-range kills and finding bugs in the game. I’m much older now, with more crags and hard edges and rust and salt stains and I know something very well: it is all about survival. Ubisoft has produced a game of exploding beauty and devout realism. But the most important aspect of SH3 - the one that has made me play it day & night since August between sips off coffee, slurps of porridge, puffs of smoke, swills of beer, squirts of piss, etc, is the wickedly immersive role-playing.

No longer Blogworthy; now Carl Winters, Oberleutnant Z. s. I’ve sailed a few other identities, all of which are now fish-eaten on the seafloor. Winters has taken us through two patrols, and we’re playing it safe. If he is lost at sea, then part of me dies and must re-berth: a painful skin-stretching hair-pulling process preceded by a shriek and a lot of water-sloshing sounds. And considering that each patrol takes about three or four hours of my time, I will be very careful to make sure that Winters and his crew of 43 bring U-47 home watertight. When you take this game seriously, an epic importance is attached to all the events that transpire. Every plane that buzzes your boat, every merchant spotted, every hydrophone contact, radio report, torpedo, nautical mile, every lightning bolt in every storm, every goddamned seagull, becomes a real experience in the dangerous and ultimately brief existence of your beloved U-boat captain. If you are wise and shrewd, yet bloodthirsty and very lucky, your captain and crew will grow old together and become decorated experts of seaborne fighting. They may even survive the war. But that hasn’t happened yet for me, and if so it will take at least another month of my time. Before I get into screenshots and all the shimmering detail, I need to reiterate my view that this is an action role-playing game that offers a ton of freedom, a shit-load of gambling and uncertainty, and a few dramatic ways to die.

SH3 graphics are magical. The screencaps shout volumes of aquatic realism, but still fail to adequately portray the real-time beauty of the virtual Atlantic. See it for yourself - it’s a must...another game that non-gamers (i.e. girlfriend, mothers) will stare at and say ‘wow’; straight-up pretty, varied, complete. After I installed the game I was content to merely sail, dive the boat, sail, dive, knuckle to port, to starboard, fire the 88mm deck gun. And you never really get over the graphics. One night I just sailed for about four hours (six beers) while watching the bow cut through waves at 13 knots. You will learn to worship the Deutsch brilliance in U-boat design – a sleek grey sea lion that is completely at home above or below the waterline; a master of the ocean. The game features four classes of U-boat that fought during the war: the tiny five-torpedo coast hunter, Type II, the classic ocean-going VII (Das Boot), the ultra long-range terror boat, IX, and the ultra-modern electric shark that only saw a few months of war, XXI. Boat physics are modeled with a convincing pitch and yaw that matches the mood of the surf.

The destruction is spectacular. Huge merchant ships shudder and sway after torpedo impact. I never tire of the ‘keel shot’, which involves sending a torpedo set with a magnetic pistol just under a target’s keel. A good shot will create a massive air bubble under the keel and cause the ship’s back to break under its own weight. The dying ship then separates into two burning halves, which bob and sink at their own rate.

Use the deck gun to puncture various compartments on a small merchant and cause it to list precariously to one side or another, finally capsizing in a catastrophic tipping of the scale.

Performance in SH3 is measured as it was in real life, by tonnage sunk. Your job is to starve the Allied war effort by sending its supply of food, fuel, equipment, reinforcements, and tea to the bottom of the sea. You and your crew are rewarded with medals, promotions, and renown. Renown is the currency you use to upgrade your boat or purchase a new one, and recruit high-quality sailors (or replacements). This incentive keeps you searching for fat convoys, hulking battleships and lone tankers – juicy blubber for the hungry cargo shark.

Good performance will also allow you to transfer to other bases (e.g. La Spezia in the Mediterranean) in order to have a varied and diverse career of marine killing. With the right boat you can patrol West to Halifax or as far South as Freetown.

Making contact with enemy ships is difficult. The extent of the ocean is effectively infinite, and even when you know the course and speed of a potential target, you may miss him by 30 km on either side. Range for visual contact is about eight kilometers in good weather, and when submerged the hydrophone (an indispensable device for listening to ships’ screws turning in the water) can, with the right ears, detect ships at about 20 km. A strong hydrophone operator is essential – he will allow you to estimate the whereabouts and course of targets, the spacing between convoy lanes, the position of escorts, sub hunting patrols, etc, allowing you to skulk into attack position undetected. Approaching a convoy is a delicate affair that will leave your tactical map covered in scribbles and markings from countless hydrophone readings.

In real-time a flawless approach can take an hour, all of it leading up to that adrenaline-charged moment when your periscope slides through the surface and your Weapons Officer declares torpedo launch.

A good strike will sink about 3-4 targets, preferably chubby tankers or bulging battleships. Perfect shots will target fuel bunkers or powder kegs, setting off hull-cracking secondary explosions.

While realism can be poured on in teacups or pitchers, making gameplay simple or uncomfortably challenging, stealth is a central part of the hunt. When you are detected your targets will become evasive making it hard to score a critical hit; merchants swerve, warships accelerate to unmatchable speeds, and escorts converge on you and begin their dreadful search with sonar. Depth is your belligerent friend and you will find yourself running deeper and deeper with held breath, hoping to give relentless destroyers the slip.

You are governed by several nerve-wracking constraints on U-boat performance:

1. At some critical depth your boat will be crushed by the weight of the ocean. You don’t know this depth exactly but it is probably around 300m. Damage to your pressure hull will reduce this depth considerably.
2. When submerged you run on battery power, which is of course limited. You need to recharge using diesel engines, which require air, and hence surface-running. On the surface, by day (and later in the war by night) you are visible to eye and radar, and are especially vulnerable to air attack: planes can bomb you before you have time to dive.
3. Underwater your crew steadily turns O₂ into CO₂, which is poisonous when concentrated. Eventually you must surface to air out the boat.
4. While submerged all noise can be heard by the enemy, from the engines, to the pumps, to your boisterous crew of brave young Germans. Noise = death, but it is reduced by distance and depth, and hence you will be tempted to test the validity of rule 1.

All of this adds up to extreme tension, variable outcome, and superb nautical violence. Success is glorious – sink a battleship with two torpedoes and then evade the swarm of hornets and 30 depth charges and live to reap the tonnage in captain’s log.

Failure is literally crushing. A direct hit from a depth-charge (DC) will probably destroy your boat instantly. Close hits will cause flooding. I recall a psychotic mission into the extremely shallow waters (20m) of the port at Scapa Flow with the intent to prey on merchants and warships docked there (as a matter of fact, U-47 did this successfully on Oct. 14, 1939). U-64 was not so lucky: I was detected by a patrolling destroyer which quickly closed with me and scored two DC hits. I had four compartments flooding quickly, but my damage control team was able to seal them before it was too late.

The added weight sunk the boat and it came to rest on the seafloor.

I needed to pump out the water in order to raise the boat, but that would make too much noise so my only chance was to stay silent and hope the destroyer would bugger off and leave me for dead. Unfortunately it had sonar, and it was able to pinpoint my resting place exactly. The final DC caved in the command room and that was it. Food for the hag-fish.

That’s not to say that there still aren’t some bugs and shortcomings of SH3. Ships can sometimes sail through rigid structures (i.e. a breakwater), your crew may choose to climb up the conning tower and go on watch while the boat is at periscope depth, and it is annoying that I can’t alt-tab out of the game. There are a few graphic glitches, and the odd crash. It would have been nice to see more specific missions and dynamic orders from high command – i.e. “intercept this and that, about here, with the help of these and those, and watch out for them.” I wish I could write comments in my captain’s log rather than just have stock entries added automatically. Also, while it would be purely candy-floss, I'd like to have access to all compartments within the sub; right now it’s just the command room and sonar/radio room. And, I wish flooding and damage were accurately modeled on the interior. That would be insanely cool, and would add more to see/do on the sub interior and thereby increase the quality of the game when played without time compression.

Furthermore, it would be neat to see lifeboats deployed by sinking ships and your crew should be able to abandon ship; death can be disappointingly sudden. But I could go on for a while about these wishes, and really I should probably spend the time looking over Carl’s shoulder. The game is excellent as it is and if anything, these perks should go into the next installment in the series.

SH3 has a thriving mod community. I’ve used the RuB 1.44 (real U-boat) mod that can be found on the rich naval gaming-site www.subsim.com. This is a great mod that corrects some of the weaknesses in SH3 as it was shipped. In a lot of ways it makes the game harder and more realistic – sound contact is made spatially vague and radio contacts are fewer and less detailed, minefields are included, and convoys have been altered. There is another great addon called SH3 Commander, also available through the site. This utility creates a more detailed profile for your captain, allowing career customizations and the ability to monitor performance and produce reports (see Glog for a summary of Carl Winter’s ongoing career). All together these mods seriously enrich the gaming experience and are worth investigating.

I read about SH3 in Andy Mahood’s Sim column (August PC Gamer) and he warned of it’s addictive quality. While I don’t want to use the word ‘addictive’ (reminds me of police), SH3 is extremely captivating and time-consuming, and now I find myself stealing time to feed my precious infatuation with naval combat. To me this is the highest form of gaming joy. When fully immersed in a game I reach a point of fanatical enthusiasm that eclipses everything else; the experiences become engraved in my memory in front of all other things that might be going on in my life. That, my fellow screen-zealot, is the mark of a truly awesome game. Simulations do this to me often, as do RPGs, and when they are combined, loaded with torpedoes and nonfiction and put to sea, the result is a game that should be a mandatory part of 8th grade history class, and with a requisite monthly commitment for every year following. For those who have missed the standard curriculum, I advise you to buy SH3 at once and begin your moonlight career as a U-boat commander.

Note: the first image (periscope looking at bridge) was 'borrowed' from the SH3 'best screenshots' section at Subsim.com. The picture was posted by CCIP.