Silent Service II

1990 computer games Amiga games Atari ST games PC games

Five years after Silent Service MicroProse published second version of the game with improved graphics, but basically identical with the original. As they say you can’t improve the perfection...

While the first Silent Service struggled with graphics and sounds the basic concept of the game was brilliant - the whole submarine was split into just few screens in a way that you had the feeling of being aboard the ship. You had the periscope view, bridge view, all the gauges and status gathered in one screen and a map to give you idea where are you. The simplicity of that proved so successful that to this day the basic principles in submarine simulators are the same - even in Silent Hunter 5 when you get the periscope view the rest of the screen is covered with gauges presenting parameters that you need to fire torpedoes, identify the enemy, etc.

No wonder Silent Service II was more or less the same - I mean how can you improve something that turned out to be the perfect solution? While the hardware has improved between Silent Service and Silent Service II we didn’t have to guess any more the identity of the ship we are observing through periscope - instead of simple big pixels presenting the vessels in second version graphic objects were used representing the ships from different angles. On first glance it was a vast improvement, but with time and experience you didn’t get more information out of it - the images used were still a bit oversimplified, so sometimes it was really tricky to guess if the vessel you are looking at is actually coming at you or moving away. In some of the angles it was hard to determine what kind of ship is the target, not to mention it was sometimes annoying when the enemy ship was switching between different angles in a matter of seconds.

Another improvement was the career option - while in first one we could take part in war patrols, in Silent Service II we could have link them together and take part in a string of war patrols.

Overall Silent Service II was improved comparing to the first one, but at the same time it seemed to lost a bit of its identity - the atmosphere was different, the game engine was different, some of the things seemed to be too simple even though it looked much better.

Our rating
★★★★☆

Video
★★★★☆

Audio
★★★☆☆

Playability
★★★★☆

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