Silent Hunter: The Resilient Appeal of Sub-sim War Game Cold Waters By Richard Estep

As a teenager during the late 1980s, I spent many a happy hour in my darkened bedroom, hunched over my Commodore 64 and staring at the portable TV set until my eyes bled. After flipping a few cassettes, I immersed myself in what software house MicroProse liked to call “the dangerous waters of Tom Clancy’s World War III.” The game was, of course, the classic of submarine warfare Red Storm Rising based on the novel of the same name.

The USSR had invaded Western Europe, and as mechanized hordes rolled through the Fulda Gap, it was up to lone sub commanders in Seawolf and Los Angeles class hunter-killers to wreak havoc on Soviet shipping.

Fast-forward thirty years, and I’m doing the same thing, thanks to the good people at KillerFish Games. The design team obviously loved Red Storm Rising as much as I (and thousands of other gamers) did, and it shows in every aspect of their own sub sim, Cold Waters. It’s as close to its predecessor as it is possible to get, which is no bad thing; why mess with perfection?

Cold Waters sees you taking the helm of an American attack sub, each of them era-specific and offering varying degrees of challenge. It’s up to you to learn the ins and outs of each vessel type, with the help of some tutorial windows that will teach you 90% of what you need to know. Graduate from the old warhorse Sturgeon-class boats, firing spreads of straight-running ‘dumb’ torpedoes, to Los Angeles-class subs that deploy wire-guided homing torpedoes and cruise missiles to sink ships from over the horizon.

This is a game that’s relatively easy to learn and tricky to master, occupying that sweet spot between arcade-like simplicity and proper warfare sim. Most of the tasks aboard the boat are abstracted. You’ll tell the crew which weapon you want to be loaded in which tube, for example, but won’t have to handle the minutiae of opening doors and flipping specific switches in order to get it done. There’s enough versatility to make the game satisfying, but not so much that you’ll feel lost in the minutiae of handling your boat.

After getting your feet wet (sorry) on a training mission or two, it’s time to handle some more challenging fare. Single missions pit your sub against an enemy wolfpack, a surface battle group, or even just one single undersea opponent. These are entertaining ways to increase your level of expertise and try out different tactics, but where the game really shines is in campaign mode, a series of linked missions in which your success or failure helps dictate the ebb and flow of the war. There’s a real sense of contributing to the big picture when you foil an amphibious invasion or take out a pack of Russian subs; it’s equally discouraging when you fail miserably, only to have the Russians dipping their toes in the English Channel as a direct consequence.

The graphics engine is superb, rendering 3D models of subs, ships, weapons, and aircraft in just enough detail to make Cold Waters a truly immersive experience. At the highest settings, the ripple of the ocean is mesmerizing, and there are few things more satisfying than following the path of your torpedoes all the way in to blow holes in the waterline of an enemy ship. Watching a target vessel die is almost embarrassingly good fun; the ship lists toward the damaged side, fills with water, and slowly sinks beneath the waves, often dumping oil and catching fire as it goes. I learned the hard way on more than one occasion that it’s too easy to get caught up in watching your kills go down, only to eat a snapshot torpedo attack while you were distracted.

Cold Waters is a game that rewards patience. Even the most modern sub has a limited missile capacity, and charging in at flank speed is a great way to end up at the bottom of the Atlantic. Learning how to stalk an enemy is paramount, developing sonar contacts and slowly maneuvering into a position of advantage before launching an attack. When the torpedoes start humming through the water, the game changes from one of cat and mouse to a frenzied knife fight in a phone box, leaving you to juggle noisemakers, active sonar, damage control and reloading, all without (hopefully) cutting the wires on those guided torpedoes you spent so much time swimming in to the perfect attack position.

For PC users, decent submarine simulators have been a little thin on the ground. Jane’s gave us 688i Hunter Killer back in 1997, which was more simulation than arcade game. The experience of taking the conn of a Los Angeles-class sub was modeled effectively, requiring a decent amount of effort to fully grasp but at the same time rewarding the time invested. For those of us who cut our teeth on Sid Meier’s Silent Service back in the 1980s, the Silent Hunter franchise picked up the WW2 torch and carried it on into the 21st century. Running from 1996 all the way through 2010, these five games really captured the Das Boot vibe of taking a German U-Boat to sea. The first three games focused on the Battle of the Atlantic, with later entries in the series taking the player’s sub into the warmer waters of the Pacific for Silent Hunter 4, and back into the Atlantic for the series’ swan song.

While submarines are on the way for World of Warships, it’s hard to recommend a better undersea PC gaming experience than Cold Waters, particularly if you’re not a big fan of multiplayer. Depending on your mood, you can spend an hour or less in a one-off single engagement, or lose an entire afternoon patrolling the North Atlantic shipping lanes and see World War III all the way through from start to finish. Few other games offer the flexibility, versatility, and (forgive the pun) depth of Cold Waters. This one has been running on my hard drive for the past two years, and I predict that gamers like me will still be launching torpedo spreads and Tomahawks at Russian flotillas for many years to come.

Cold Waters is available via Steam.