Ironwolf Studios S.A. and Daedalic Entertainment have brought us this authentic and historically accurate naval simulation called Destroyer: The U-Boat. The game is based in 1942, the time of WW2 during the battle of the Atlantic, which is when the United States Navy created a convoy protection system against the German U-Boats that were depleting the numbers out of the water.

The first thing I would recommend doing is the tutorial, which is an option in the main menu. This will show you the fundamentals behind the game. There is a lot to learn within the tutorial and it explains everything you need to do to win the battles.

You are put into a Fletcher Class Destroyer which gives you five different locations within the ship. The combat information center, the sonar room, the gun direction, and the lookout station. There is a campaign mode in this game, which unfortunately at this time, it was not unlocked, but there is still lots to do just playing the game in general. There are 4 different types of convoy battles you can be involved in which are small, medium, large, and custom.

You will find with these convoy battles that you will need to dedicate some time and patience to the game, and all the convoy battles have random weather and time. The small convoy is about 1 hour of game time with 9 ships in the convoy. The next option you have it the medium battle. This battle has 20 convoy ships and you will need to dedicate an estimated 3 hours to complete this mode, which takes us to the next being large, which has a whopping 30 ships with an estimated time of 5hrs to complete this gamemode. So you can see you need to dedicate some serious hours to this game just due to the complexity of the game. You also have the option of custom, so you can set how many convoy ships there are, which will then tell you an estimated time for completion. This is ideal for people who are limited on time but want to smash out a game.

Enemy behaviour could not be mastered with numerous different attack locations, and how they attacked always kept you on your toes. There are different U-Boat captains in the game and how they behave. You have the aggressive captains, sneaky captains, and the captains that are a little more patient, or you get the cold, hard brutes that were a little on the hard side.

The controls for this game are a little more basic than most games. There is a lot of clicking as most things get moved via mouse click, or you have the option to type in things like coordinates. The controls felt so crisp on this game, with everything moving how it’s supposed to, feeling like it had been looked into extensively.

Everything in this game is visually stunning, and being in the Captain’s chair, commanding where the ship is going, and charting where the enemies might be all looked so real and felt like you were on the ship doing the work properly. There were times when it all felt dark and spooky which brought to the effect of that era in time’s naval warfare.

There have been over 300 voice recordings made for this game from professional voice actors, navy school cades, and US Navy experts for the immersion and situational awareness put into this simulation. The radio calls, and everything else you hear, sounded era accurate with everything from how the sonar was beeping, down to the crew telling you radio instructions when you asked them to do it. I found at times I got sick of hearing everything I was doing being repeated back to me via the radio. This simulation also had a darker-themed soundtrack with 4 different multi-layered pieces which changed their levels depending on what was happening in the game and the tension behind it.

Anyone that loves naval warfare and likes getting into the more technical side of things, having to chart out where enemies are or locate them on the sonar or radar, this game is for you. There is so much behind this game and it is not for the faint-hearted, especially when it comes to learning the game. I look forward to seeing where this game goes with the campaign as I would love to jump into that.

Written by: Hayden Nelson