I’ve written hundreds of reviews, previews, and retrospectives during my twenty-odd years as a games inspector. As many of these appeared in the British version of PC Gamer magazine and nowhere else, now and again something from my archive may appear as one of THC’s daily posts. Below the jump you’ll find a love letter to Aces of the Deep, the 1994 U-boat sim that put the ‘happy’ in Happy Time.
No headstone marks the resting place of Joachim Gratz and his comrades. A slick of diesel oil indicated the spot for an hour or two, but was quickly dispersed by restless currents and churning destroyer screws. That’s how life goes in one of the finest wet warfare sims ever made: one minute you’re on top of the world – an infamous ace of the deep – the next you’re gone, erased by an ocean as vast as it is merciless.
Joachim’s mistake was overconfidence. He chose to strike when really he should have shadowed or slunk away. Because Dynamix’s U-Boot classic comes with an unpredictable freelance-friendly dynamic campaign, rather than a draining do-this-or-fail mission chain, you’re constantly having to make difficult engagement decisions. Do you prey on vulnerable stragglers or go after potentially richer and more dangerous convoys? Do you act alone or radio contacts to BdU (U-boat HQ) and wait for wolfpacks to form? Is there time to turn your boat about and use your stern tubes or should you make like a Croatian city and split? Every patrol is peppered with the kind of hard choices that elevate blood pressure and add silver to brine-beaded beards and temples.
Every patrol is also sprinkled with periods of intense tedium. Fortunately, it’s the good sort of tedium – historical tedium. Tedium laced with hope, fear, and thoughts of home. As in AotD’s spiritual successor, Silent Hunter 3, any skipper wishing to hang onto his sanity has little choice but to make generous use of the time acceleration key during cruises to and from assigned (but ignorable) patrol areas. Watching clock hands spin like Short Sunderland propellers while a red square scuttles across a navigation chart, might not sound like a lot of fun. What renders it tolerable – enjoyable even – is the fact that any moment those hands may freeze, a mugshot of your watch officer pop-up together with an excited “Smoke on the horizon, Captain!” or “Aircraft spotted!” Suddenly, magazines are tossed aside, midi gramophones silenced. In an instant, lethargy turns to lethal intent.
Many of today’s combat sim artisans seem more interested in accurately modelling vehicles and weapon systems than ensuring their customers aren’t baffled or bored. Dynamix always had the knack of creating characterful campaigns, and capturing the essence rather than the minutiae of war machines.
Don’t be misled by the lack of polygonal tars, chart accoutrements, or Torpedo Data Computer knobs in the pics accompanying this article. Though Mike Jones & co. don’t let us manually enter data into our TDCs, scribble solutions on charts, or small-talk with seamen, they do demand we confront most of the same operational dilemmas real WW2 submariners faced. Hard-pressed AotDers will find themselves forced to surface at inopportune times to recharge batteries and load externally stored eels. Early on they’ll regularly curse unreliable detonators. Occasionally, they may find themselves reluctantly issuing a ‘secure from silent running’ orders so life-saving pumps can be activated.
There are no 3D ports in AotD yet homecomings and departures manage to be memorable thanks to splendid cutscenes in which your vessel – its conning tower emblazoned with a personally chosen emblem – slips past a quay lined with waving locals and a blaring brass band. Once ashore, you can nip off to a nightclub to catch up on news of the wider war, overhear snippets of potentially useful gossip, or drunkenly ogle a torch singer’s stocking tops.
At sea, loneliness is kept at bay by a record player, and regular radio messages from friendly transmitters on the continent. You hear reports of other U-boats coming and going, updates on spotted convoys. I still get a buzz out of radioing-in sightings, and informing my superiors my craft has sent another rust-streaked toiler to the bottom. Receiving an appreciative “Keep up the good work U-113” is every bit as motivating as gaining a promotion, medal or new sub type on return to base.
Of course, no amount of mood-setting would compensate for weak combat fundamentals. It’s in the tense vertical encounters between escorts and U-boats, that AotD’s quality really shows. Herr Gratz thought he could sneak past the screens of ASDIC-equipped destroyers shepherding a large Mediterranean convoy. He thought wrong. The game’s gamekeepers are endowed with just the right amount of vigilance and persistence. With skill and good fortune you can elude them, but get cocky or fixated, and you can easily end-up watching a depth-gauge needle sweep unstoppably towards The Red Segments of Doom.
The campaign, like the war it mirrors so masterfully, has its own in-built difficulty curve. In ’39 and early ’40 – the ‘Happy Time’ – lone freighters and tankers are easy to find. As the months roll by, newer, more capable U-boat designs come into service, but the advances are offset by a more organised and better-equipped foe. Only the wiliest and luckiest captains will stay alive long enough to take command of the awesome sonar-endowed Type XXI with its huge battery capacity and programmable zig-zagging eels.
None of the sim’s eight cylindrical stars can be inspected via an external camera, which is not as disappointing as it sounds considering the boxy anatomies of surface vessels. Prone to texture transparency at very close range, the ship models haven’t aged well. What has stood the test of time is Peter Lukaszuk’s remarkable recreation of an ocean swell. The constant roll of an AotD rough sea is almost as sickening as the thought that Dynamix never got round to making the Pacific theatre expansion or Cold War sequel they talked about.
Thank you. A review of Aces of the Deep may be my most read review ever as a teen. In a Swedish magazine called High Score I believe.
It was all so evocative, and yet sadly I never got around to buying the game.
Indeed. There is a hard irony here. As youths, grazing through magazine ads and articles wishing we could afford the games inside. Today, being able to buy most games on a whim, yet lacking the time to play them.
Through it all we still have the writers to share with us what we’re missing!