Sub Command

There are better vantage points to watch a war from than sweating in a windowless tin can at the bottom of the ocean, yet with no visual reference, having to rely on instinct, technology and the skill of your comrades, war beneath the waves must certainly be tense. Sub Command attempts to capture that tension and like most sub sims over the years it largely succeeds, even if the functional 3D graphics are woeful and far from adequate.

Set in more modern times to Ubi Soft's upcoming Silent Service 2, Sub Command otters three sub-aquatic conveyances to captain, three campaigns (with some duplication of missions), a mission editor and a number of standalone missions - one of which has you launching Tomahawk missiles at Bin Laden's training camps.

The missions are suitably varied as these things go, ranging from rendezvous, escort, hunter killer or long-range attack, but this being a realistic simulation, few are what you would call exciting. Most of the game is spent simply moving cautiously through the briny, fiddling with sonar settings and cross-referencing data. Actual combat is rather disappointing and in my case I just ended up attacking cargo ships to keep myself awake, which didn't work.

More than most, Sub Command is a case of whatever floats your boat. The game is for sub nuts only, as Train Sim is for 'spotters and Flight Sim for people who like planes. Personally I would much prefer the tension of a WWII sub game, but that's just me. With the is-it-or-isn't-it Harpoon 4 currently in stasis, Sub Command is certainly the best sub game in circulation; the fact that it's also the only one is slightly more worrying. More than anything else, what Sub Command lacks is any real sense of consequence, with no feel for the crew or any sense of loss as your sub sinks to the bottom of the sea.