A detailed and honest short format review of UBOAT; A world war 2 submarine simulator and crew management game published by PlayWay. We make game reviews, without the fluff.

Imagine you’re in a German u-boat during the height of world war 2, about 300km off the southern coast of Ireland looking for enemy supply and transport ships. It’s taken 5 minutes to get there from your home port of Bergen in German occupied Norway because the open world map’s so big that travelling anywhere takes a while even at 6500 times the normal speed.

Suddenly a British aircraft appears overhead and sees you. You crash dive as deep as you can without touching the seabed, but you’ve been caught in a shallow stretch of water and can only go down about 50 meters. You reduce your speed and switch on the blue lights to reduce noise and hope the enemy aircraft moves on.

Then you hear a faint clunk followed by a string of massive explosions as depth charges go off on either side of you. A couple of your crew members need medical attention and you’ve started taking on water in the forward torpedo room, so you tell the first aid trained radio operator to get to work treating the injured crewmen and get one of your engineers to try to plug the leak.

You manage to stabilize the wounded crew, but you’re taking in a lot of water and the leak is getting worse… You need to rescue your engineer and close off the forward bulkhead to prevent more compartments from flooding, but if it continues to fill with water you might not make it back to the surface.

On the other hand if you close the bulkhead and order your engineer to stay inside to try and fix the leak then he might drown, and he’s one of your highest level sailors that’s been with you since your first mission which might have a negative impact on your future missions.

Those are the kinds of epic, tense and difficult situations you’ll find yourself in in a game called UBOAT – A submarine simulation and crew management game published by PlayWay, and after finally playing it after it’s been sat in my wishlist since it went into early access in 2019, my only regret is not playing it sooner.

In U-BOAT you take command of a Type VII submarine serving the German Kriegsmarine on an a huge open world map that’s almost too big to be true and includes everything from Britain, the Mediterranean and mainland Europe, all across the entire Atlantic ocean to the east coast of the united states, and even at 6500 times the normal game speed, it still takes a good few minutes to go from A to B.

Graphically speaking it’s really nice looking and I could happily stare at the cold waves of the open ocean lapping up against the side of the boat for hours. Sound-wise it’s all good as well, but where the game really shines is its deep and rewarding gameplay that manages to make every engagement feel tense and every kill feel like you really accomplished something.

You can play it completely in first or third person view, using one of up to 7 different officers you have onboard to take control of all the critical systems onboard, including manually calculating torpedo firing paths and manning the 88mm deck gun and anti aircraft turret mounted on the conning tower, plus loads of smaller systems dotted around the ship shown with a little green cogwheel icon to make them easy to find.

The game lets you automate as much or as little as you like to increase the challenge and level of realism, but even the more advanced stuff like identifying ship types using a book and calculating the speed and heading of an enemy ship is made relatively easy by the intuitive controls and helpful in-game videos that show you what to do, not to mention the complete tutorial which, although it’s abit boring like most tutorials, it did a great job at showing me everything I needed to know as a complete rookie.
Detecting ships is done using the hydrophone which is pretty much an early sonar device that listens for enemy propeller sounds and then flags up their rough locations on the map which you then travel over to until you have a sight on the target.

Everything on your boat makes noise so you have to manage whichsystems to turn off when you want to stay quiet. Things like the diesel engine which you can run underwater once you unlock the snorkel upgrade are very loud and shouldn’t be used if you’re looking to avoid detection, and turning on the air ventilation system or water pump can alert the enemy to your rough location and bring down a bunch of depth charges on your head which more often than not doesn’t end well.

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