"A better question is: What exactly is a finished game? One thing I know, Silent Hunter 5 isn't one." -
Subsim.com review.
That review is quite nice, although I'm personally bit surprised how "bad" Mr Neal Stevens slammed SH5 even though his site is even linked on official ubisoft's SH5 main page. But then again... should he lie, he spoke the truth, so I guess its OK.
I have now been playing quite a lot of SH5. I'm using few mods, but none of those that change the UI, I'm still sort of punishing myself to stick with the idiotic console UI and keyboard setup and to that I've now learned how to use it.
It still amazes me how incredibly beautiful the graphics are, while I never take graphics over game play, I must admit that cool graphics go long way. I'd say the generic SH3/SH4 game play is on the "bottom" of the SH5 core so its pretty okay setup as it is (with the console UI and stuff).
Campaign is being advertised as "Dynamic", well I'm kind of wondering if that's one of those things where people call it dynamic just for the fancy D word. I mean when looking at the campaign files all the convoys, ship routes etc are scripted. Hey did you hear that, SCRIPTED? Yep, so its dynamic by how exactly? yes sure there is for example convoy X traveling from New York to London and then returning back to New York... but if you as player intercept the convoy, sink it... it disappears and is never to be seen in the campaign. Yes in a way that's dynamic, but lets not kid ourselves, real dynamic with the capital D is campaign like Falcon 4 has where targets are tasked, ground units moved etc according to the game phase/player actions etc.
The campaign is on phases and feels even more scripted that way. I've had to endure some *cough* "save game" problems and was stuck hammering the first two missions without passing them. I discovered that there seems to be few task forces, convoys and harbor ships that appear time after time even when you sink them. Is this due my save game problems or by designs, I can't say. Just and observation really.
Anyways, the campaign rocks in SH5, don't get me wrong. It is so huge that there is way too much to discover and so forth.
The ubisoft launcher seems to save games terribly long time with my internet connection. It can be easily staying up more than 5 minutes after I exit from SH5. Maybe this is my lagging internet connection or maybe its this slow for everyone, I cant say.
Today after several hours of game play... SH5 feels OK enough to keep me playing and learning more. Yes there are issues, severe issues... but I think I start to see the bright future with user made mod's and so on. The near future shows if ubisoft authorizes the dev team to release more patches. Without patches as is now... in the long run, I'd go back to SH3/SH4 I think.
