UBOAT

I was going to wait until after the games is fully released next week before writing a review but the game won't be changing drastically before then so thought I may as well do it now.

Uboat is the absolute definitive ww2 submarine simulator covering mainly the battle of the Atlantic and a few surrounding areas. I first purchased Uboat way back in 2019 when it was branded as a ww2 submarine survival game with some sim elements. Uboats early access journey has been long and after all the updates it has had it is now a fully fledged simulation with all the bells and whistles.

Most of the settings are configurable as well so if your not a fan of realism or challenge then you can play the game the way that suits you. You can even switch of crew management if you don't enjoy that aspect.

For some context, I am a self confessed submarine fanatic and have played every single sub game ever released going way back to the early 80's as a small boy playing hunter killer on the old spectrum 48k computer. There have been many since then including Silent service series, Aces of the deep, 688 attack sub, the Silent Hunter series plus all the other more arcady ones.

The Silent Hunter series (not the disaster that was SH5) was for me the benchmark going all the way back to the mid 90's when the first one came out. Silent Hunter 3 and 4 (heavy modding is required) have been my go to sub sims for most the the last 2 decades.

Uboat in its current form blows all of those games out the water on every level, be it graphics, sound, atmosphere, realism etc

It includes 5 Uboats in the base game with other subs hopefully coming in dlc. The early patrols will have you operating under prize rules, investigating ships etc. It will then progress to the massive convoy battles where you will encounter convoys with 60+ ships. When you first encounter a large convoy you will immediately be brought back to the classic war movie das boat, there are plenty of nods in that famous movie's direction which I personally love at its probably my favourite war movie ever.

The dlc and modding potential with Uboat is huge.

Other highlights include,

The most realistic tdc ever programmed for a computer game.
Sounds of ships sinking on hydrohones
Crew management, unlike with the Silent Hunter games you never feel like you are alone on a sub anymore
Plenty of historical campaigns to work though including optional side missions.
Possibility to affect research prioroties
Wolfpacks
Contact reports from bdu and other subs
Full uboats interior where you can walk around
best ever graphics for a sub sim
career progression, medals etc
Random crew and equipment breakdown events
Excellent modding support, could we see a gwx type megamod in the future? Don't see why not.
Very receptive developers who are willing to listen and implement ideas they hear from players

Like with all games though, there is always room for improvement. There is not a massive amount of ship types with the base game so would be great to see more variations with merchants and other warships, I would even happily pay for these as I know there is a lot of work that goes indeed to making these.
They have also just implemented a blue print system for sub upgrades which could use some more work to iron out some rough edges.
The point system which is used to buy/upgrade things is on the easy side so there needs to be more balancing work done on that as well.

Overall all though I've been having a blast playing Uboat and I would recommend this to anyone who has even a remote interest in what it must have been like to spend weeks out at sea on these things.

Going to give Uboat a solid 8 out of 10 with hopefully good post release support and dlc pushing it up to 10 out of 10.

Been playing all major ww2 sub games since wolfpack on DOS back in the day.
This game has allmost everything i want from a ww2 subsim, And some stuff im not to much of a fan of, like:
-Sailor management gets very tedious very fast. Especially on the type IIa boat where fuel management is critical.
i run 2 shifts, and having to assign 2 sailors to engines every 12 hours during transitions kills the flow of the game imo. Timecompress for 12 hours, then pause when shifts change, assign sailors, timecompress for 12 hours, repeat.
-Lack of automation
I really wish they would add the ability to make me able to automate actions more, So i dont have to micromanage as much.
Like:
-Keeping sailors on critical stations like engines, and not the officer at all times.
-Setting red lights at dusk
-White light at dawn
-Turning on Blue light enables silent running and then turn off gyro and eletrical diveplanes.
-Turning on compressors after surfacing after a manual set depth dive
ect.
Then there are actions i would like to not have automated, like alarms
-Slots in the storage hold
IMO the storage in the cargoholds should only be limited by weight and/or a grid rather than a few single slots.

At first I stayed clear of this because the gaming community commonly referred to it as "The Sims - U-Boat Edition." Frankly, I was looking for more a sub sim with some... depth... and passed it by as a subsim with a gimmick that perhaps doesn't work well. But in spite of my initial misgivings and having fond memories of previous WWII subsims, I decided to take the plunge and try UBOAT.
I have to say it up front... I believe this is the best WWII sub sim since Silent Hunter 3.
Everything has a familiar feel to SH3, but with a fully modeled sub that you can walk bow to stern unhindered and interact with a multitude of stations, better graphical fidelity, decent audio, and good variety of mission types (Some not historical, but can be disabled if you aim for the monotony of "full real") in a "Dynamic Campaign." The customization options for difficulty are plentiful as well, ranging from highly automated "arcade-like" to hardcore sim which doesn't hold your hand and requires you to plot intercept courses, gather all information for torpedo firing solutions (which you can then input into a fully modeled, realistic, TDC), and manage any crises that can and will arise.
If I had one major complaint, I would levy it directly at the audio, which is a bit of a mixed bag. Thankfully, there are sound mods and full steam workshop integration. There are even mods which add many new ship types, both ally and enemy, to encounter in the world which can add a great deal of unpredictability.
The "Sims" aspect is present, but not as annoying to manage as I expected. Depending on how much micromanagement you wish to deal with, settings can be customized so that sailors and officers will, for the most part, go about their duties without your interference. However, if you want to get the best out of your crew, you can set specific schedules and tasks, assign specific sailors and officers to priority tasking, and even assign what priority level your crew should give to individual tasks on the boat. It can be either complex, or simple, your choice.
In addition, when combat starts and things begin to go wrong, you may see crew get hit and knocked out, ragdolling down, while your medic rushes over to help, carrying them to a bunk where they can be stabilized. An example of what can go wrong... I was on a patrol near Tobruk in poor weather and my watch crew were minimal because I thought the visibility was so poor, we'd never stumble across a warship. I was wrong. A corvette opened fire on us just after the watch sounded the alarm. I looked to the conning tower and was presented with the explosion of a cannon shell... which was close enough to one of the watchmen that it knocked him unconscious. The blast knocked him back, off the rear of the tower, bouncing off the deck, and into the water, where he drowned as I heard the calls for man overboard. I ordered the crash dive and we were able to get away safely, but lost two sailors in the process.
Another interesting example of what can happen: I recently intercepted a carrier group, at night in a light rain storm, and rushed at them on the surface at flank speed. The hope was to get into a good position, close enough to get hits on the fleet carrier with a full salvo. At great distance, I see star shells being fired to illuminate the area. I know they couldn't possibly have spotted me as I was still just over the horizon and could only see the tips of their masts. I then observe... explosions... jutting up over the horizon. It took me a moment to realize... another U-Boat had also intercepted the carrier group, and had scored at least two torpedo hits... and the destroyer escort was now hunting him. After diving, my sonarman confirmed this theory when he was able to identify the screws of an allied U-Boat... desperately trying to evade the destroyers.
Seeing things like this happen is something that sets UBOAT well apart from its predecessors. It can look and feel a little "janky" at times, but no more so than other sub sims on the market today or of yesteryear. It's a very well done sim, and if you are interested in the strategic, slower pace of submarine combat, it has a lot to offer.

Review: UBOAT
---{ Graphics }---
☑ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☑ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☑ 9
☐ 10

Really good "light" Silent Hunter. Enough details and complexity in order to satisfy all the "semi UBOAT sim" captains. For hardcore ones, I say: Try this out!

Crew management fun and easy enough, not too much "nitty gritty" stuff. Missions various much, not just "sail to point X and sink Y tons amount of enemy shipping".

What I'd like to see more is some sort of sense of being there. Now the radio stations play same songs over and over again and there's zero "news reels" or such. I'd like some sort of sense of "being there", then this game would be 10/10!

In looking over my Steam account it appears I've been buying games here for 18 years. I have hundreds of titles.
I can point to a very small handful of the games in my library and set them aside as something I sincerely feel I was undercharged for, when considering the amount of enjoyment I have gotten from them. Uboat is one of that short list of games.
Whether you simply like sim games, or you're a diehard submarine warfare buff, or you like sitting for hours on the conning tower listening to the thrum of the diesel engines and sailing through some very engaging ocean effects and weather, this is the game for you. This small group of developers have plugged away at it over the years and turned it into a gem of a game.
Add in an active and passionate modding community and you would be hard-pressed to find a better purchase in the Steam store.

edit4: i found an article in reddit saying the game was NOT balanced around the 2 initial uboats (IIA/IID) but rather VII was the main focus of the game. i had my fun starting with IIA, but the learning curve was way way steeper than it should have been, from what i gather, from people that played early access (i didnt) and only played with VII.... so i suppose a good advice if you never played the game, is to start with VII and if you enjoy it, make a new game with IIA for a more challenging start....
edit 3: after 10 more hours, this is a great game but you need to understand how to chase targets on low class subs, higher class subs can use diesel underwater, thus being able to use the ctr+right-click to chase. but older-starter subs require a lot more work and a bigger learning curve. (read more below)
edit2: after 5 more hours playing, ive realized the tutorial explains everything wrong and this is why i cannot intercept any targets.
(edit 1 is below and just contains tips)
so the issue is the tutorials tells you to ctr+click to intercept and this almost always leads to "cannot intercept". to be able to intercept, you have to manually plot the full course of the enemy ship, then go to the surface and use speed 5 to intercept using your calculations.
To calculate enemy speed and distance, you have to do rough estimates watching how the enemy ship moves relative to yours. this is not easy. and is very "guess-timative". and is NOT explained at all in the tutorial.
the time to find targets remains high, you can timeskip it mostly; but now im almost always able to intercept a target i find. i only wish i was told about this on the tutorial. still a great game, playing as a "pirate" looting ships is very fun, you can steal the cargo and sell it for profit.
Original review:
after almost 10 hours playing this, i can say, it's good, but maybe it's too realistic....
you start off by doing the tutorial, which is around 6-7 missions which explain most of the systems and the calculations and blah... most of this things are done automatically by your crewman if difficulty is medium and even so, in this short time i learned to do manual calculations which are fairly simple, u have tools to do calculations on the world map too.
the issue is, that's it, once u finish the tutorials, you are playing a real war in almost real time (although u can fast forward).... you will spend weeks at sea tracking ships, and you have 5 torpedoes and u have to go back to restock (this last part is not that bad, since i have not yet found 5 targets in a single trip)
most of the time you are timeskipping, even during battles (this is because you start the battles, but then usually have to run away timeskipping since your ammo is very limited)
normal loop is, spend bazillon years looking for target, (which involves submerging, using a "sonar-phone-thingy", which can ONLY be used while submerged), then you find a target, you will probably not be able to catch up to it cuz it's going opposite from you, great... find a new target.... repeat a quatrillon times.... till you finally find a target and are able to intercept.... now is the "fun part".... make automatic or manual calculations and launch the torpedo, which may dud or miss or explode before the target, etc.... say you manage to destroy the ship... awesome.... that's it.... (you can collect enemy crew as hostages from lifeboats or salvage some cargo from the water, but both are pointless)
then you go back to target finding... at first seems like WOW, THIS IS SO COOL, then after the first 2 hours of no targets, well.... again, lets just say it's TOO REAL, way too real....
i know there's some war junkies out there which couldnt be happier about this, reliving the war one minute at a time like if they where actually there.... but for me, any game that starts resembling a desk job, it pretty much becomes one....
there's some "extra missions" which are not "sink all merchants", but are variants of "sink this specific ship", "put mines here" (which use the torpedo launcher slots) or "recover this thing from that other thing(wreck/ abandoned ship/shore base)" (you just go there, click a button and wait)
the u-boat has an INSANE ammount of control, every aspect of it very well simulated, and the crew schedules and everything.... yet in the end you care nothing about any of the systems since you are always doing fast forward in the middle of the sea and everything is automatic.
there's also a LOT of upgrades, which maybe, someday, will make me find ships faster, but if after 10 hours i still cannot do that, idk how much more time i would have to spend to be able to kill something without waiting 2-3 hours....
i dont regret the buy, i had my 10 hours of "fun", but i would only recommend this to someone who wants to live inside world war 2 (from the german side point of view) to a very big extent, and doesnt care that the "fun" (that for me is sinking ships) comes around only once every blood moon...
the end.
Edit:
Since this was voted up, i'll add a few useful things i learned which might help someone starting out with this game.
The tutorial doesnt quite explain it, but i picked it up pretty fast, and that is that the electric engine is way more efficient than the diesel engine.
Diesel can only be used above surface and electric can be used above or below surface.
But diesel recharges the batteries and it does that in a fragment of the time it takes for the batteries to be used up by electric motors.
Also, the "Sonar-phone-thingy" can only be used underwater. (and is the only reliable way of finding ships, you could also get msgs from other uboats and follow the coords, but unless you plot the trip, you are very likely to miss the target, not to mention waste a ton of fuel to rush there)
So i did 2 things:
- Created a schedule to submerge, 9 hours down, 1 up, 1 down, 1 up, thats 12 hours, so copy paste that twice into the full 24 hour schedule. what this does is automate the min-max of electricity-fuel between engines and gives you 50-100 times more travel with the same fuel.
(you still have to trigger the compressor valve manually every once in a while to have enough compressed air to be able to raise back to the surface)
- Set the radio man for priority on the "sonar-phone-thingy" so he always uses it if you are submerged, so he can track ships.
then plot a course and skip time on 16000... now you are basically travelling optimizing your fuel and tracking ships time and not wasting time doing this manually....
8 of my 10 hours where played like that, time skipping at max, trying to find ships.
the other 2 hours where highlight moments where brief encounters occurred, often ending in me sinking a ship with a torpedo, but sometimes me being sunk to the bottom of the ocean for trying to sink a destroyer convoy =P
Enjoy, cheers!