UBOAT

The game is good; you can play for a whole day and, when taking a break, realize how long you have been playing. In terms of gameplay, it is simple: you command a submarine, sink ships, and manage the crew. It feels like This War of Mine in a submarine; it's good. For combat, this game takes a very realistic approach; one depth charge is enough to sink you. So, keep moving, use the seabed for cover, and deploy decoys to escape. A hull breach in this game can flood a section of the sub in less than 2 minutes, which is not enough time to have a mechanic fix the leak. This can be frustrating when you are detected. For missions, you can deploy a landing party to sabotage a railway or drop a spy on an enemy coast. There is not a large variety because you play as a sub, and in WWII, the main mission for subs was simply to sink merchants carrying cargo. The other types of missions are secondary, and this can feel tedious, particularly in a campaign starting in 1939. Regarding the types of subs, with the latest DLC, you can play with all types of U-boats that actually participated in WWII. With the "milk cows", you can have fun doing a Caribbean patrol with a Type VIIC or a Cape of Good Hope patrol with a Type IX. As for bugs, crashes, and similar problems, they exist and can break the gameplay. Sometimes it feels like the devs either don't care or don't have the time to fix them. This game was launched in Early Access in 2019, and since then, some bugs have persisted. However, the evolution of the game, even if slow, shows that the dev team is keen on keeping it alive. They will keep it updated and packed with extra content; for example, the Elektroboats Types XXI and XXIII will come, but it will take time until they arrive. For those who have played the Silent Hunter series, this game adopts a more simulation-heavy, crew-managing style rather than being purely combat-oriented. Since this is a small dev team, with patience and time, the game will have as much content and detail as the later Silent Hunter games, if not more. A good example is the Laconia incident, where in UBOAT, you help rescue as many people as the boat can hold. The modding community is alive, and the developers have implemented some mods into the vanilla game, which shows they are committed and open to suggestions and requests. I have been playing the game since day one, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a submarine simulator where managing the crew is just as important as sinking ships.