Final Verdict

Nothing would be so pleasing as to say that Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific is a worthy successor to Silent Hunter III, an evolutionary improvement over the latter game. Sadly, due to the bugs it has even after two patches and the interface problems, it's difficult to give that glowing an endorsement. Wolves of the Pacific is a good game and graphically far superior to Silent Hunter III, but a couple of weeks more in beta, and some outside testing to tell the designers to stuff their interface where the sun doesn't shine would have done wonders for the game.

The Pacific War is in many ways more active and interesting than the one in the North Atlantic. Being less focused on submarines is actually a benefit, because the player gets to run into enemy task forces more often and in believable circumstances. Watching the Japanese empire expand and then retract, being involved in intercepting shipping from Japan to China, Indochina, the Philippines, Borneo, New Guinea, and the islands of Micronesia feels very, very real. Some of the drawbacks of the game, like the lack of variety in boats and torpedoes, have more to do with historical limitations than a fault of the designers, though they really should have modeled the Narwhal for precisely those reasons.

There's no doubt that Silent Hunter is the premier submarine simulation franchise out there. Arguably it's the only one that tackles World War II era sub combat, but it does so better than any other game before or since. Silent Hunter III was a worthy successor to Aces of the Deep, and Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific is as gratifying as Silent Service II was in its day, with the added benefit of being a much more realistic and interesting sim, to keep up with the times.