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canned missions spoil a great sub sim

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

"688 Attack Sub" was one of the first big (if not quite realistic) simulator programs based on nuclear submarines. In the game, you had your choice of driving either a "Los Angeles Class" attack sub or its most famous (in 1992, anyway) adversary, the Soviet (now Russian) "Alfa" class sub. The interface required that you control the sub from various positions or "stations" in the sub - helm, weapons, sonar, nav - which did much to foster this feeling of being inside a real sub. There was no exterior ("spot") view, though the American sub featured sonar imaging that allowed you to view sea-bottom topography (identified objects like ships and "biologics" appeared as floating globes).

Gameplay was challenging in ways that were great, but also in ways that were needless. The situation screen - mostly used for your chart/map - occupied a small piece of your computer's screen, the rest of your screen is dominated by buttons. However, the arrangement of the buttons leaves a lot of bare space (meant to suggest control panels) making me wonder whether space could have been managed better - that map screen really is too small to contain the huge amount of information comprising the situation at hand. Weapons - not too much here, just torpedoes and Harpoons, and only a few of the latter. A quirky feature keeps you from firing more than one missile at a time. Tomahawks are just TLAM & not anti-ship models, and the Alfa has no rockets at all. You can only fire at locked on targets, meaning you actually need targets bearing & range - you can't TMA your targets, and "snapshots" are out of the picture entirely. Maneuvering is too basic, especially depth control. There's no ballast control, or even pitch - just a lever that goes up and down (you can control the speed of depth changes, but that's basically it). For some reason, ID'd targets disappear from the screen the moment you lose contact - a more helpful feature would have allowed you to keep their old data around, and guesstimate from there. For a game involving submarines, sound is pretty lame - sonar analysis and active sonar provide the best effects, but everything else is pretty tame. Powerplant & prop noise is non-existant, and the game goes through this weird pause-mode cutting off control inputs whenever you're hit or shoot something. (The game tries to curb this by abbreviating repeat similar events - if you get hit two or three times in a row, or get sonar pinged more than once, you only feel/hear it the first - though that just makes the experience unreal.) The game's biggest flaw is its limited mission-base: only a handful of missions, and they're all pre-scripted. In one of the Soviet missions, you have to locate and drive away a British nuclear sub lurking in the waters of the Kola Peninsula. It's a promising mission, and it feels cool the first time - but the RN boat always appears in the same place, so there's little replay value. There's no mission editor, no randomizer or instant-action option, and no campaign.

In other ways, and despite overly simplistic simming, there are many worthwhile aspects of the game. Your subs come with hydrophones, allowing you to listen and figure out yourself the identity of a contact before the computer crewmen tell you (subs, surface ships, biologics & torps have their own unique sound). Unlike other games, like "Red Storm Rising" you won't always be able to figure out how many torpedoes are out there or how close they are or whether they're tracking you. There are also some nifty strategies involved - the Soviet boat carries fewer torps than the 688, and on an anti-convoy mission (one in which you're backing up a Soviet SSGN) you'll run out of torps before you run out of targets, and will have to trick US-fired torpedoes into hitting their own ships. (That strategy takes advantage of the Soviet sub's unique edge in speed.) The challenges of running the game's subs more than makes up for the limits of the game's engine, but unfortunately highlights the limits of its mission base. This game was followed up by "SSN-21 Seawolf", but is itself a great pre-Windows/pre-Pentium submarine simulator that combines a reasonable learning curve with an immersive experience. If you've got a "legacy system" like a 486 to play games older than the early 1990's, save a berth for "688 Attack Sub".

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