Silent Hunter 3: Grey Wolves X Mod - PC Review

Written by nervouspete on 17/08/2009  –  Filed under: Reviews

Tags: mod, PC, simulation, war

Running away, giggling, makes it funnier...

This is a bit of a worry, my only reviews so far have been for rather nerdy war games. Better add an adorable DS Lite title or something - perhaps some genius Phoenix Wright laff-fest, or obscure cool like The World Ends With You… Hmm…

Aw, hell - a game about U-Boats it is…

Grey Wolves Gold is a mod for Silent Hunter 3, though in actuality it’s more like the sort of expansion pack that completely alters and rewrites a game. To indicate quite how exceptional it is, firstly I must speak a little of Silent Hunter 3, a U-Boat simulation released in 2005. Considered mighty enough to garner a respectable rating of 90% on Metacritic, Silent Hunter 3 was both realistic and – thanks to a sliding scale of difficulty – accessible. Don’t fancy employing trigonometry in calculating your torpedo run? Simply sit back and let your weapons officer do the donkey work, just as realistic and he even selflessly sits back and lets you press the big red button. Blessed with a dynamic campaign that incorporated changing weather systems, convoys, enemy air and sea patrols, even random air raids on your own harbours as you come in to dock - Silent Hunter 3 aped the events of the battle of the Atlantic with icy aplomb. It didn’t hurt that the graphics, usually a weak spot in simulations, were completely bloody beautiful.  Gorgeous sunsets, choppy storms, plumes of smoke from burning ships with their flames reflected rippling in the water, the outside world had a salty realism and a natural beauty – flecked with the darkly thrilling sight of the results of your handiwork. The interior world was even better. Your crew reacting expressively to your decisions and celebrating or cringing at the consequences, they cowered in fear as the enemy ‘pinged’ your sub from above, or swung their gaze around anxiously at the thin skin of their metal tubular womb as the sub creaked and groaned under the pressure of hundreds of metres of ocean above. The series of U-Boats you commanded were lovingly detailed as well, with a fully 3D environment, radio and hydrophone room, main command section, captain’s bed and conning tower, deck gun and periscope. It was a peach of a game, but not without its myriad niggling flaws of omissions and bugs.

Grey Wolves corrects all those flaws, and adds so much more.

So, so much more.

Primarily it enhances the atmosphere, adding such depth to the game world that the mind slips into some sort of stubbly pockmarked Jurgen Prochnow U-Boat captain reverie. Firstly there’s the sound: Due to something or other, the game shipped with a gramophone feature that despite the promises of the programmers incorporated only one measly tune, which was the stock title one. Grey Wolves throws a wodge of classic 1930’s and 40’s pop songs at you, with a few classical numbers. The pop songs are fairly obscure but genuinely excellent as well, and surprisingly catchy. None of your George Formby or Gracie Fields tat here, but a compilation I’d have laid down money for. You can find yet more music on the website listed below, including rather boorish Nazi pop songs such as ‘Das ist Musik’. (You can also convert your own MP3s into .ogg files, wang them into the Gramophone folder and enjoy them too.) The GWX team also overhauled all the sound effects, adding a realism and clarity, mainly though cunningly ripping them from Das Boot. It works surprisingly well, and when you hit that crash dive button it sends a thrill through the body to hear the shrill bellow of “ALARM!”

The graphics are retextured, everything looking that much grimier and more detailed. Details lacking in historical accuracy; the little things such as the pristine medal-bearing uniforms being replaced with the grunge look genuinely favoured by sailors, or monthly changing pin-ups appearing in the cabin. Explosions are beefed up, the choppy waters look more realistic and there’s a greater variety of ships and even land features such as bridges and more extensive ports and coastal gun batteries.

As for the way the game plays, there’s lots of under-the-bonnet tweaks. Ships are sighted from a greater distance, you get random messages from command and other U-Boats reflecting historical events, the enemy AI is improved and game rules brought more into line with realism. When being hunted by destroyers and corvettes you really do have to use all your smarts post 1941 to escape. From throwing an emergency hard a starboard when the charges hit the water to planning a way to sneak into the heart of the convoy whilst avoiding the searchlights and sonar of the escorts. It’s less forgiving, and more thrilling.

Jack! Rose! Jack!

So far so immersive, but Grey Wolves urges the inclusion of a separate mod, thankfully a lot, lot smaller than the hefty download that comprises Grey Wolves. This bonny little fellow is called ‘SH3 Commander’, and is basically a little program that enables you to enjoy a more immersive career as captain. When you boot it up, it presents the option to create a new captain complete with portrait and historical start date and location. You can tweak game world variables, from the composition of your crew to the opacity of the ocean. The main feature lies in the reports it automatically generates. Every time you complete a patrol the program will write a more detailed report of ships sunk and the attacks you survived. Names, tonnage and casualties are put to the ships you sunk. SH3 Commander also adds random events pre-patrol. One of your men might get transferred, or knifed in a bar fight, or given compassionate leave to visit bombed-out relatives. More extremely, your career has a small chance of ending as you are retired through traumatic stress, or you get a promotion to a desk job, or are killed in a bombing raid. (You’ll be reassured to know that these events can be over-ridden.) A nightclub offers bawdy humour and real world gossip and news.

It’s a neat device, but the most beautiful feature of all comes into play when you download the additional radio broadcast pack. A big bundle of real radio reports from the BBC and CBS, featuring such luminaries as Ed Murrow and William Shirer, are accessible via your gramophone when you hit certain dates. So you can listen to reports on the British declaration of war, or Pearl Harbour, or the progress of the Battle of Britain and Shirer’s reports from Berlin – dancing on the edge of censorship. It really is immersive and combined with the graphics creates a sense of being there, a real atmosphere and a realisation that this wasn’t some instantly mythic, ‘greatest generation’ black and white story but for these people, a terrible, twisting modern world filled with uncertainty and hyper-reality.

I realise that many of you may be scoffing at this point, reckoning all this to be merely over-enthusiastic icing on the simulation-cake that is nerdy PC gaming. But it really does add a strange ‘being there’ feeling to the game. Yes, I admit, it does take a fair bit of time and practice to burrow your way into the heart of this beast. There will be a lot of time of spent staring at maps and hitting the accelerated time button. (Thankfully the modders aren’t so extreme – like some insane players honestly are – to insist on real time play.) And yes, your first half dozen attacks will fail miserably until you work out what you’re supposed to do. But for this trying period there are many handy guides explaining how to intercept, how to evade, and a wonderful exercise in protractors and compasses that got even a mathematics-phobic like me within minutes skipping across the map to easily engage distant nebulous contacts.

The only downsides I can see are the extensive loading times and minor bugs that are helpfully forewarned in the manual, such as the weirdness that occurs when you save submerged. Also, like The Sims, you will experience moments of ‘what the fuck am I doing with my life?’ clarity after spending an hour working your way into striking position against a Baltic convoy. Also, some of these downloads be huge, matey.

No matter, Silent Hunter 3, combined with these mods, to my mind even manage to outdo the much vaunted flight sim Il2: 1946 in depth and atmosphere. Quite simply it’s the greatest simulation around. I’m a bit confused and worried as to how certain chaps could sacrifice so much of their lives to sculpt a good game into an excellent one that becomes something of an educational tool to boot, but I’m thankful and impressed nonetheless.

As deep as the Mariana Trench and as compellingly immersive as a swimming pool filled with bubble-wrap and wine gums. Silent Hunter 3: GWX is more than a simulation of a U-Boat, it's a simulation of a bleak, thrilling, horrifying reality. Something special indeed...

For some excellent screenshots tweaked to look like old-timey photos, see here:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=121555

Crikey, looks a bit fiddly but me wants! How Do I Install this?

Firstly buy Silent Hunter 3 online. Install. Then download the US or EU, DVD retail patch labelled 1.43. Install.

Download Grey Wolves (1.3gigs) from here:

http://www.thegreywolves.com/

Install.

Download Sub Commander (highly recommended) from here:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=147237

Install:

If you wish to install further updates, such as the excellent lifeboat mod and the radio broadcast mods, first download and install the titchy but mighty program JSGME. This is a handy tool that painlessly with a couple of clicks adds and removes mods to the game without any faffing around, allowing you to easily test differing combinations. Get it with instructions here:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=141773

Additional Mods:

Lifeboats:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=134988

Radio broadcasts:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=89254&highlight=chamberlain

You can find many guides & FAQ’s here from the rather friendly SubSim community:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=96026

ALARM!