UBOAT Review

UBOAT (developed by Deep Water Studios and published by PlayWay S.A.) is a submarine management simulator with segments of naval combat, placing you in charge of a Kriegsmarine squad from the beginning of the Second World War until the end, where you sneak over to Argentina and scuttle your sub (quite literally, there’s an achievement for doing this).

In the game, you manage the supplies and maintenance of your chosen submarine (of the many you can sail), as well as the well-being of your crew and your customisable sea captain, whom you can send off on holidays for rest and recreation to places like Hitler’s holiday home. Your submarine crew, including the customised captain, can die or fall overboard, resulting in you having to replace them, which surprised me at first, thinking that if I lost the captain, I would have to start the game again.

UBOAT’s campaign is made up of historically accurate missions like laying sea mines across English waters, hunting the merchant navy in the Atlantic, and getting reconnaissance on enemy ports. Early on in the war, you power through a lot of the missions, as your foes are not as strong as you. However, as the war rages and the Allies grow bolder with better technology as well as more frequent aerial attacks, you get the short end of the stick. This can be the turning point of the game since the frustration and loss of valuable teammates can be crippling to your playthrough and can turn off the average player from progressing into the harder levels.

The game has simulated a particular era of the war in the same vein as other WWII submarine games have done before, all while creating something fresh: adding a little bit of RPG and crew management gameplay to allow the player a closer connection to their team without romanticising warfare, since you begin the game by attacking unarmed ships.

Out at sea in a fully stocked submarine, you manage your fuel and battery by automatically switching them while surfacing and submerging; if either one is depleted, you’re dead in the water and will have to revert to a save. Reverting to saves might not be too bad, but if you run out of fuel or torpedoes while destroyers prepare to drop depth charges that could sink you, it results in a few hours of gameplay wasted. The AI works well, moving autonomously around the map, including allied ships and submarines you can assist in each patrol. The detail put into the particular submarines you sail is a plus in my books, allowing the player to go into first-person perspective to move around the claustrophobic interior, giving an interactive aspect to the game’s mechanics for people interested in naval history.

The gameplay is slow since you cannot fast-travel to any port until the mission is successful, so your only reprieve from the monotonous bobbing of the waves is the ability to fast-forward time, which only exacerbates the seasickness. The game will pull you out of fast-forwarding if there’s an alert of an unknown ship or aircraft, or when you reach your destination.

You navigate by placing markers on the game map and measuring the amount of time and resources it will take to get there and return. While most missions have you patrolling the seas for anything to attack, random orders and events will occur to keep the game a bit livelier.

When you see a ship-shaped thing or exhaust smoke on the horizon of the sea, it’s a bit suspenseful. You turn the engine into its silent mode to not get blipped on their sonar until you’re right up on them and slowly move in. Combat is done by getting the sea captain, and only the sea captain, to handle the weapons, with the crewmate loading the armaments and the radioman on standby until you need them. You then work out the trajectory of the torpedo to the target ship and then calculate the percentage chance of the hit. 

The game never gives you a 100 per cent chance since you can do everything right but miss because the target zigs and zags at the right moment. If the hit is successful, and no one is around, you can capture seamen and supplies from shipwrecks. If not, you can always run away or, if you have a cannon on your sub’s deck, surface to fire at them. If you are discovered, merchant ships may attempt to take evasive actions to prevent a torpedo from hitting them, but any military vessels and planes will go in for the kill with varied results of success.

The sub will automatically have any damage repaired by the crew if you have enough ship parts in your inventory, and any injured crew will receive first aid, with effects like bilge (water within the sub itself) affecting how the vessel operates. If you sustain too much damage, the crew will either drown or the sub will sink. You will also have to do a full inspection of the sub once back at port, done by a radioman or engineer, to make sure crucial parts of the submarine are still working. If you don’t, you can have things like the radio stop working mid-patrol.

The ocean where you will spend most, if not all, of the game is quite vast and, while the animation of the waves is repetitive, it will react differently depending on the sea you’re sailing, the weather and the seasons. The audio in the game isn’t something to write about too much: basic alarm sounds and the non-diegetic horn when spotted, though the game’s voice acting is all in German, and the various radio stations you can tune into to help crew morale are a mix of German and English classics from the time.

It has taken me a while to get a read off of what makes UBOAT interesting enough to play two separate playthroughs before coming to a well-thought-out review, and I’m still not too sure exactly why it took me so long to say: it’s a sweet naval game. In retrospect, I expected from my first impressions that it would be another WW2-era title to add to the pile, but given a chance, it could translate into any war-time naval strategy sandbox game of any technological era. I’m happy to be wrong about my initial thoughts and yet, I‘m burnt out from sailing 50 metres below the surface only to surface surrounded by the entire British fleet. I’m going on a vacation.