izigame.me

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!