UBOAT is a simulator of a submarine from WWII era, yet different than all you have seen so far. It is a survival sandbox with crew management mechanics while its primary theme is life of German sailors. The boat is their home, but it can become their grave at any time.
In UBOAT you control the crew in order to control the boat. You look after their physical and mental health, because if the sailors are hungry, tired and their spirit is low, there’s no chance of winning even a skirmish.
The extensive damage system is a foundation of the game's survival elements. Unprecedented situations are bound to happen as the effect of received damage, testing player's creativity and ability to stay calm. You can try to save the whole crew or leave someone behind, to save the others.
While your ship travels through the open seas, you will often find yourself being on your own. Use your management skills to spend resources taken on the trip optimally and in special cases try to recover them on the sea, by asking your allies for the help... or by looting wreckages of enemy ships.
Steam User 276
EX Submariner here, telling you this game is a 10/10 for submarines games and games in general. Booted up the B128 Beta Update for the new tutorial and have not looked back. I love the early starts so I can really wreak havoc the pacific and reap the rewards.
-Start Patrol
-Sink 2 British Merchants
-Gets message that i need to sink a Merchant with Top Secret Info onboard.
-Merchant is in a battle group with a battleship in the front and back of group, 2 smaller cruisers flank each
side of battle group.
-NBD I'm submarine man. I Know WW2 Tactics.
-Go Deep
-Sneaky Sub into middle of battle group
-Pop up and send torpedos flying in every direction
-Target Sinks
-Dive
-One Cruiser turns towards sinking ships and catches a whiff of me.
-Turn
-Its quiet
-stop diving thinking I'm safe
-EXPLOSIONS
-DAMAGE REPORT
-Engine Room has no power and flooding everywhere.
-Sink to crush depth
-Notice i left one noisy piece of equipment on
-One mistake killed Capt Klaus and his Merry Men
-10/10 would spend another 40 mins out on a mission to be sunk in such an epic fashion.
Steam User 218
As being a submariner for 20 yrs and a longtime gamer, I would like to discuss the basics of this game and some of the game play features. UBoat is a WWII sub sim that takes the game and adds a good dose of personality. The game features the ability to manipulate any of the crew members operating within the boat. This in its own adds to the already tedious operations of the Sub itself.
Starting from the title page I will break down some things of noteworthy contention. in the beginning the game offers three boats to choose from with a specific starting location. The boat is fully manned (minus 2 crew members...I will get into that later) and awaits your interaction to talk with command to choose from three different missions with the rewards associated with fulfilling the primary objectives. The selection is from what I can tell is somewhat random but with varying degrees of difficulty, you can tell by the base rewards for each. After selection you have the options to outfit your boat with extra provisions, such as food, repair parts, weapons and the like. This where they got this close to what it was like, the amount of resources you can bring with you was space available limited as well as provisional costs, which you start with 6000 units to purchase these items with, including extra torpedoes. While in the game as you accomplish things you earn these points, but for starter captains this is the base amount you get. In reality this would be equated to money that has been allocated to your boats command, provisions were purchased with your budget. The acquisition of extra torpedoes usually fell into the squadrons allocation funds. The use of prestige points to acquire all items is a bit easier.
Once you have the extra provisions you want, and I do recommend a few extra food items for moral purposes, you can speed through the loading of such items with a click of a button on the main screen, an option will appear once you have made a purchase. The loading of items takes time, especially loading more torpedoes from the warehouse. This will change the time of day and decrease visibility if the load out finishes at night, not to mention any rain storms that can happen. My only takeaway from this is that the charts you use to plot out of an area, is darkened as well. If your going to do a up a chart of the local area, it will be easy to read for the navigator at night or day. Plotting your course on said chart is easy enough, the darkening of the chart is just not right, I would fix that to have lighting effects to be lit more or the chart details to be more pronounced.
While underway the time scaling is very nice, nothing worse than waiting around for nothing to happen while in transit. When in deep ocean areas the scale is quite massive allowing you to traverse the ocean areas very fast.
While transiting to mission points the game has random side missions that happen via radio messages, doing the extra work gets you extra prestige points and gets you used to operating the boat. This was a nice feature that was a certain factor while doing actual patrols. The metering of O2, Fuel, Battery power, and moral is a critical piece of information for any trying to be successful out at sea on a boat.
While in combat tracking down ships (targets!) is mostly easy. the only thing I did not like was the ship and boat indicators on the chart while zoomed out. The ship indicators should point in its known direction or at least have some sort of enhanced arrow indicating the direction. This applies for your boat and any targets about. Only when you zoom in on the chart can you see the direction of yourself or others, and if its dark out the chart is dark (at night, or in bad weather). I have encountered some odd things while attacking a pack of British destroyers. First I had damaged a destroyer with a torpedo in the aft section of the ship, rendering half the boat underwater and still able to maneuver and change speed. In my personal experiences in the Navy I view that to be a bit far fetched. Mainly due to the fact that most engine rooms if damaged and fully submerged don't quite operate at all. The effects of seawater filling a compartment full changes not only buoyancy as well as crew operations and their ability to mitigate damage and equipment operations. Destroyers of that age were thin hulled and easy to flood... even nowadays destroyers are not that well protected. Maybe fix the games ship internal structuring with critical destruction points like the bridge, engine rooms, ammo bays etc..
The other attacking issue I had while launching torpedoes at these destroyers was the reporting of the time to detonation on a torpedo track. I had launched at about 1000 meters and so the Torp had a small distance to travel. The game gave me a halfway report when the torpedo was almost at the target. The torp missed but was still being time tracked and noted as a miss well past the proposed impact zone.
Another issue I noted was the overall coordination of this destroyer group, after scoring my initial hit on one of the destroyers the other ships (2 others) just kept going. As being one on my crew in the Navy and being a lookout during all levels of weather conditions and time of day, I know for a fact the other destroyers would have visually seen the explosion. Visibility was well past 5 km at night, not to mention they did have radio communication to speed up fleet issues...in most versions of destroyers with the usage of sonar they would have heard them very easily.
Which leads me to the detection range of my surfaced sub, with diesel engines running vs. electric engines. The decibels seemed to not change at all when shifting to electric engines, which is when a sub becomes more stealthy, curious. that needs to be looked at and fixed. Maybe the db was changing but not indicating or I was blind to some indications (doubtful). Here is something very basic about sound propagation in water, its highly efficient and fast in comparison to in the air due to how close molecules are together (metal being one of the most efficient) to transfer the sound wave... which is why in space sound is not transferred.
Some good things to control in the ship were the various damages that can happen through combat let alone collisions. De-watering the boat even during normal times was a cool addition for the ones that choose to micromanage that effect. The addition of this water changes the buoyancy of the boats bubble (the angle of the overall boat) while submerged, which makes depth keeping a bit tricky and potentially deadly.
The overall graphics of the game are average with the boat itself being very nice. There are some parts that could be refined but all in all it is workable/playable. I have only done a few runs with only seven hours of operating this game, so some of this will change in time hopefully. I will update as I go from here on out. Please comment as you see fit, I will respond in kind.
**************************************************
This is an update as promised as to the overall game play of UBoat after my initial review.
Earlier I had mentioned basic selection of subs in the beginning selection screen. Come to find out the selection is a bit more than 3 subs, its about 10. they all are of the same model type from what I can tell (type VII). All have some difference of past successes varying the initial reputation points to use for purchases.
Other things I have gained notice to are three varying mission types that HQ offers. The top option is usually a candy patrol, with awards that correspond to that level. the middle selection sometimes offers extras such as another officer to add to the crew, and increased rep points for usage in port. The bottom one is usually the more appetizing of the three as far as reward goes. with three tiers of rewards associated to the overall requirements of the mission. Such as patrol distance within the patrol box.
Steam User 169
Please read this review with in mind that it is still early access when writing this:
I have never been a big fan of simulation games, yet this one did peek my interest and I am very positive on how well it does. I will just put it up with a typical pro vs cons situation for me:
pros:
- graphics are very nice
- weather elements does give different feels and makes do affect your visibility (as it should)
- nice booklet to recognize enemy ships and type
- you can go into first person mode of your officers and control them that way
- possibility to speed up time and pause can be quite helpful at times (especially when in stressfull situation)
- clear indication on why enemies ships might find you so you know
- easy access UI to give commands to officers on what tasks they should do
- Management systems so that officers do tasks on their own depending on how you set it
- Great modding avaiable from the community
cons:
- tech tree is very quick to go through (I had researched everything before 1942 despite the extra penalty time for researching technologies before their historical development date)
- Time on sea: Currently my 'stay' at sea is always approximately 14 days before I have to return to port mainly due to now having any more torpedoes left to fire while I easily still have enough fuel for another 14 days and food provision for 40 days.
- tutorial: The game does come with some basic tutorial on how to do things, it lacks one big one. It doesn't show you / teach you how to torpedo. I had to learn everything by watching Youtube tutorials and asking Twitch streamers for help.
- missions: The missions are always the same 3 kind and after a while it become very repetitive. Of course since it's a simulation and U-boats in WWII had pretty much only 1 role, it's something to be aware off.
recommendations to the devs:
1) have more tech tree options and penalize it harder so the entire tech tree can't be rushed within a ingame year
2) diversify the missions a little bit so it isn't so repetitive
3) I barely receive missions from the BdU while on sea. I understand it also wouldn't happen to often, but I think there's more that could be done here (especially when it comes to forming wolf packs. After 80 h I have only received 1 BdU mission to join a wolfpack and it was ruined because AI uboats just went into a total suicide frenzy by charging in and killing some ships and getting killed themselves)
4) of course your action on the sea does not have any effect on the outcome of the war. But I could be nice to receive some words of your actions, for example when you manage to sink a battleship you can then read about it in a newpaper that said battleship was sunk
Overall a fairly relaxing and chill game that is quite enjoyable. It has its flaws and strengths but nothing game breaking. If you enjoy other U-boat games, then I bet you'd also enjoy this. There are a lot of videos on youtube to check out and the community (twitch and discord) is very helpful.
Steam User 100
A good surprise.
As a SH3-4 subsimmer, I was suspicious about the management thing, yet too lazy to dive into "Wolfpack" U-Boot hardcore.... but it is great. Motivated and active DEVs, sure early access, but it's becoming a gem.
I hope it gets to simulation standards for
- Navigation tools
- TDC, manual solutions.
But clearly, for subsim beginners, it's captivating, deeper than it looks, different rewarding playing styles (you can do a lot manually, or just give orders).
Not very user-friendly, intuitive UI, it took me time to understand the various zooom levels.
I already spent some hours time on it to learn the ropes and had fun. It has serious potential! Go DEVS!
Steam User 132
I was on a mission around about 800km southwestwest of Britain and my target was a little freighter (with Top Secret infos onboard) in a convoi escorted by 17-38 ships (i was told by my sailor at the hydrophone). So i was investigating and in position to wait for them. Beside this little freighter was a tanker, an aircraft carrier, 2 Cruisers, several destroyers and too many corvettes to count.
I was turning into position, turned the engines and everything off, just waiting to locate that little freighter in that convoi.. it took me a few seconds to find it and right in that second a destroyer passed my submarine within 30 meters. I was scared but he didnt noticed me.
A few seconds later i turned the electical engines on, faced my uboat right towards the freighter, loaded/warmed up the torpedos, calculated the torpodes to the target (speed, altitude, dispersion) and fired two torpedos at the little one.
In that second i turned and dived at the same time, down to 180 meters. Everyone onboard was quiet and the sailor on the hydrophone listened. The freighter sunk, but the two cruisers and three corvettes turned back and were looking for me. I was on slow speed all the time facing west to get out of this situation.
A corvette was direct on top of me and one of my sailors said "Wasserbomben". I turned left immediatly. I zoomed out and saw nothing but black. And then a big explosion next to the direction where our uboat was seconds before. They continued bombing and i kept avoiding those bombs. Suddenly i heard a scream. One of my sailors had a mental breakdown and i was just like, shut ur goddamn mouth or we all gonna die. The captain came and knocked him out and he was quiet. A few seconds later one of my crewman had a heart attack and i tried to fix it with my medic, sadly it didnt work. My crew was getting crazy slowly, cause we were diving/ avoiding those waterbombs for 2h ingame now. The cruisers and the corvettes kept hunting me, but managed it to avoid them all, not a single bomb hit us.
The ships kept circling, but at one point they all were on a turn. I shut the engine down and was waiting, and they kept goin for my last known position, but no waterbombs at all. They turned by and i was going up to periscope depth, nobodys there. We made it!!
Steam User 108
Still needs work to make it playable for newcomers like myself.
But as a 65 year old man, this game is everything I like.
Steam User 100
I am an old gamer and spent 10 years playing over 20 hours a days to the point of severe addiction that took a LONG while to overcome. I have been an old sub gamer from the '80's starting with Microprose Silent Service from 1985 (I still have the original box and game documents) and just about every sub game from then, to now. UBOAT is a gift to all of us, most will not appreciate it as much as those of us who have been dedicated to computer gaming since it began. Realism in UBOAT is light years ahead of where Silent Service was, and even ahead of games 20 years later. While there are performance and other issues with UBOAT, they are able to be overcome with patience. I highly recommend the game to anyone and suggest they take the time to appreciate what it is today and see the potential of what it will become. I am NOT a PAID reviewer or FANBOY, I just know where computer games like this started and appreciate the level of effort it takes to get to this point.