Silent Hunter 4: Wolves Of The Pacific

Well with Silent Hunter probably being the definitive submarine sim on PC in recent years,it was with great expectation that Ubi Soft released the Pacific based Silent Hunter 4.Now the final product is on the shelves,it is with soul crushingly bitter disappointment that after "playing" the game for a few weeks,the outstanding feeling is this game was rushed to retail way before it was ready.There are features in the manual which clearly DO NOT function correctly in game (the chronometer radar and sonar functions immediately spring to mind-features which are critical in ANY submarine).Two patches later issued by Ubi did fix some of the many bugs and enabled extra graphical detail (which has to be said IS impressive),but many,MANY more were and still are preventing this title from being the killer title it deserves to be.Other major show stopping bugs are during the main campaign with the repetition of the missions and the regular forced retirement after 1 mission when accepting command of a new submarine no matter how successful your comabt patrols may be.
This clearly is not acceptable and now that the much sought after 1.3 patch is now in doubt (users have to got VOTE and literally beg the developers on the Ubi forums),it is seemingly left to the modding community to fix the numerous problems Ubi Soft neglect to put right.This is a crying shame as the potential of the game is beyond words and if only Ubi would listen to the fans of the series then this title would surely be one of the top PC games in recent years.Personally,I think Ubi have inflicted severe damage on their reputation as a software publisher with the contempt shown towards the customers who supported them by purchasing this game and the whole sorry situation probably means the end of the Silent Hunter series.Just so much potential wasted.
Overal,if you can overlook some of the glaring faults,ignore some of the missing features,bite your tongue when suffering the crash to desktop bugs,then you will see how good this game could be.I would have given this game a full 5 stars if it worked even 75% as well as it should do,but as it stands now,2 seems generous.Shame on you Ubi.

"I am running an AMD Athlon 3200+ with NVidia 256mb and 1gb corsair paired RAM. I have spent the last 2 hours changing the settings and finally gave up and set everything to minimum, lowest res 1024 x 768, everything unchecked, slide bars down to nothing and it is just about useable until some action occurs on the screen, the game is just not playable! :o("

"I guess I will have to wait until they invent a computer that can play this game flat out, because I can not believe there is one that can cope in the year 2007!"

Have you been living under a rock or something, there are a plethora of affordable PC's that have been 'invented' that can run this game more than adequately.

With reference to the game well, with my recent self-build invented PC it runs like a dream. Everything maxed to the hilt. Great natty improvements over SH3 with the visual touch given a superb boost. Water detail etc fantastic.

This game is fantastic, the graphics are top notch! I have in my collection all the silent hunter games, this is the latest incarnation, quite simply this is the best one so far. Like all games, you'll find bugs, but this is corrected through the ubisoft web site in the form of patches, which took all of ten minutes to fix.
Trust me, you won't regret this game in any way....a true work of art!

Visaully this game is fantastic!
Thats about it though.
This game is awash with bugs, most of which happen whilst playing campain so if thats what you enjoyed, don't even start, ubi seem to give the impression other patches are on the way, untill that happens aviod.

I'm a massive fan of the Silent Hunter games, and I was initially quite skeptical of moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific. However, SH4 pulls off the setting with class.

Gone are the brown, European landscapes of the North Atlantic. In are the new, sexy "LOST" esque pacific Islands.

The gameplay is awesome. Use your radar to track down enemy convoys. Listen to their movements with the sonar. Avoid the enemy destroyer escorts. Sneak up on them and unleash a salvo of deadly torpedoes before getting the hell out of there.

There are one or two bugs, but those will be sorted out in patches (indeed, most of them already have been).