The app store is a sea of emptiness when it comes to realistic 3D submarine simulations.  While you’ll pass a fleet of zombies clinging to every log,  puzzlers,  platformers and flyers of every stripe, your chances of pulling a submarine app from the depths is slim.  Silent Hunter by Ubisoft is a lone wolf in these waters and when you see the opening cut scenes, your naval pulse may well skip a beat.

Silent Hunter’s cut scenes, visuals and design aim for realism but it’s game play lists to the arcade side of submarine warfare.  While this isn’t necessarily bad, the choppy waters found in Silent Hunter can lead to a certain seasickness.

The campaign takes you through a good number of missions that get you acclimated to your sub and convey a  story of the allied efforts to thwart Hitler’s secret weapons program.  You navigate to your missions via an overhead map passing convoys along the way which you have the option of engaging for extra experience or passing up for your primary objective.

Once you take to the sea you’re given a behind-the-sub view which doesn’t look that impressive.
The 3D modeling isn’t  terribly sharp or detailed as Silent Hunter doesn’t take advantage of  the  iPhone 4’s HD graphics or retina display.  The bulk of your time at sea will be spent in one of 3 attack views which look much better; a familiar periscope view controlled by tilt, an anti-aircraft gun controlled by a d-pad or a nice looking deck gun that's controlled by a gauge that slides up the left side of the screen.  These firing modes are accessed by touch buttons and are simple to use in sinking the multitude of ships and planes each mission throws at you.

When you sink ships they split in half and sink leaving behind arcade bubbles of torpedoes, health or steering improvements so there’s very little chance of running out of torpedoes or in fact being killed.  That’s one of the weaknesses of Silent Hunter.  It’s simply too easy.  I found little reason to upgrade my sub or weapons and only failed one mission by running into a tanker.  The torpedoes simply require you to lead your target.  Shooting down planes is fun but a little easy and the powerful deck gun requires timing but only takes a couple hits to sink a large battleship.

The underwater look isn’t very convincing and the shallow waters give the feel of a toy sub in a bathtub.  Silent Hunter provides little of the underwater tension, stealth gaming or detection avoidance that are natural characteristics of submarine warfare.  When taking damage from planes your device vibrates and freezes until you dive underwater.  I couldn’t find any way to turn this vibration off and found the freezing simply annoying.

The missions are fun and exciting as you take on wave after wave of convoys and planes but there's not much depth or variety other than an occasional capture mission.  The weather effects are very nice as you battle in rain, snow, sunset and the dark of night

Like the rise and fall of the waves, for every up there was a downside. Yet, despite it’s weaknesses I still enjoyed my tour aboard Silent Hunter.  The exciting arcade type missions with stirring music that have you switching weapons and views along with pretty good length get it 3 ½ stars. 

goyami@comcast.net