Silent Hunter

Forget soldiers or airplanes - submarines should be excellent source material for a game.

The tension of stalking your pray, the surprise of a torpedo launch, the constant threat of detection and the smug satisfaction of outwitting your enemies before diving back to safety should all add up to a thrilling gaming experience.

Impressively, Silent Hunter makes all of that boring. Despite the best efforts of the art and sound team to inject some much needed tension into the game, this submarine saga is a letdown.

While the original PC series may have set the standard for U-boat simulation, the iPhone version of Silent Hunter is very much rooted in the arcade camp with power-ups, ammo crates, and regenerative health making an appearance.

Instead of worrying about the crew's condition or air supply, Silent Hunter focuses almost entirely on shooting ships, shooting more ships, and then occasionally shooting a plane or two.

There's a large array of weapons to wield, almost all designed to take down a different kind of target and each with their own special controls to fire.

Standard torpedoes require you to look down the periscope to aim, while the AA gun uses a virtual joystick. Guided torpedo has to be tilted to direct its path and the deck gun is so pointless as to discourage its use.

The reason you never use it is because it's officially the only way you can get hit in the game. Sure, ships can drop depth charges and planes can drop bombs, but your sub moves so nimbly and the auto-aim on the AA gun works so effectively that you'd have to be asleep for them to do any damage.

There is a detection level that ominously lights up when you've been spotted, which should be a cause of fear for a vulnerable submarine, but enemy ships never seem to be bothered about it, happily sailing away from your position so you can pick them off at will.

In fact, during the whole length of the campaign the biggest threat to my sub was accidentally scraping against sinking wrecks to grab a power-up. When inanimate objects pose more of a danger than the living opposition, something is seriously wrong.

The lack of difficulty is made all the more frustrating by the generally excellent atmosphere.

The graphics, or more precisely the weather effects, look fantastic. When rain droplets dribble down the periscope's lense during a lightning storm or sunbeams flicker through the water, it's hard not to get drawn into the underwater world your sub inhabits.

Likewise, the dull bass thud of a launching torpedo and the ominous sound of the sonar help ramp up the atmosphere significantly, but nice weather effects and sound alone can't help Silent Hunter escape the vice-like grip of dull gameplay.

Clearly the potential for a stunning submarine simulation exists and the presentation and controls bear that point out, yet the laughable difficulty sinks this otherwise pretty game.