Like all sims of the 90s, this game don't come by a tutorial. Right off Mission 1, you're tasked to search for boomers hiding among ships reinforcing Cuba. The difficulty knows in not knowing where, what, how, and not knowing yourself.
First, where? The map is big for gameplay. You need 15 mins of real-time to traverse from the center to the edge of the map at flank speed. You're deaf at speeds above 3/4 power so the search can be very tedious if you don't know where to look.
The actual playing area is also larger than the map presented to you, so players might miss out other parts once they sail in a certain direction.
Second, what? How do you even know where to look? Thankfully, I can contribute my 5 hours of learning. Read the mission again, you are to check out the Russian task force, that means military ships. Ignore the civilian ones. That's where we go to the sonar room.
Third, not knowing ourselves.
What's our sight range? What's our listening ability?
Periscope range is something under 5 miles. Passive sonar under 10 miles. The sonar room gives you a little bit more.
The below screenshot shows some underwater noises to our West (aka bearing 270), let's turn out bow by punching "backspace".
Something noisy, let's steam there.
Let's check our sonar again.
Looks like our quarry is to 190
This is the fourth part, how?
Submarines are quieter than surface vessels, you don't hear them until very near, and the surface noise is not helping.
After pointing our bow that way, surface contacts quickly appear
Russian ships, just the guys we are looking for.
Three bars of blue are usually whales, but that line of blue next to the green is a potential sub. The violet line to the right means a helicopter.
Due to the noise, I had to swim among the navy vessels, I found an unidentified submerged object. Unless I've been fired upon, that's our guy.
There you go.
Someone else blundered into our ears.
Thermal layers are a big thing in modern sub sims. Listening ability drops when you are separated from your target by them. We go down a thermal layer to hear them better.
470 feet is close enough, else we would scrap the floor.
For records sake, that's the single blue bar that we are looking for. Our Typhoon class quarry.
And... done.
Thoughts:
SSN-21 Seawolf unfairly expects you to be an experienced captain on mission 1. You don't know the size of the map. You don't know how quiet the boomers are. You don't know how well you can hear. If I didn't play this in the 90s, I might have dropped this game.
Fortunately that's not the case, so I could now shake my head at the my youthful persistence then. I also learnt the operation of the sonar. How I managed to get so far without learning an essential station must be a combination said energy and lots of luck.
Pro:
Excellent stealth game in the spirit of 688 Attack Sub.
Music fits the tension perfectly.
Cries of panicked officers are memorable after all these years.
Cons:
Target information box often obscure map and targets.
No explanation of hearing range.
No tutorial.
Findings before ending the post:
While completing this post, I found out that the tutorial is in the reference guide -.-
If you are keen to play this game, make sure to download both the manual and the reference guide.
Comments
Post a Comment