It doesn't sound like you can simply head out to sea and look for a fight though - everything seems completely mission based, with those missions selected from a map. Every player will have a certain quota of time compression points, which refill every 24 hours, but they're an obvious thing to sell. Microtransactions are likely to kick in hard here, for individual pieces and upgrades, as well as Time Compression points to get you between missions and back to base quicker than you can say "Ahem" while rubbing two fingers together in a pointed way. While working through the campaign, you'll also be upgrading your submarines. Every server (one per continent is planned, though that may change) will have its own version of the war running, with power constantly shifting back and forth between Axis and Allies. It's not clear how great this will be for players who join the campaign during a victory streak, but early missions at least should still guide them into the action instead of throwing them into a tutorial where they're expected to fight seven destroyers and Great Cthulhu. As players blow them up though, missions will start generating more opposition like destroyer escorts. At the start for example, you may see plenty of undefended freighters. While missions are preset, and you work through them individually, everybody's successes and failures are tracked and affect the overall server campaign. The most interesting part of the game is the dynamic campaign. All combat is PvE based, with a certain amount of randomness added to the missions to keep them fresh even on a replay. The online side kicks in with the ability to team up with three other players to form a wolfpack, and really go to town on the strategic side. You can lose submarines during a mission, and if so, they're apparently gone for good - though you'll always have one to avoid a Game Over. You're also in charge of making sure you have enough fuel, torpedoes and other resources, and levelling up your crew to make your submarine more efficient.
SILENT HUNTER 5 TUTORIAL MISSION FREE
You're free to ignore them completely and do everything yourself, but they're there if you need a helping hand with anything from fighting enemy destroyers to getting back home for repairs, upgrades, and a celebratory bratwurst. Not comfortable with torpedo firing solutions? There's a guy for that.
You of course are on the Axis side, as the captain of between one sub and a whole flotilla, with a team of NPC officers at your beck and call. The setting is the Atlantic, between 19 - a version based on actual Kriegsmarine maps. (More realistic than a German U-Boat commander with a British accent, anyway.) If you're going to be restricted by technology, at least this is realistic.
More than the other games, it showed the limits of the technology with a 3D view apparently restricted to a small periscope, though that doesn't matter too much. Like all of Ubisoft’s recent online announcements, Silent Hunter Online is a free to play game that runs directly in your browser and, like the Justice League Unlimited episode The Great Brain Robbery, is based on Flash. Silent Hunter Online is a cut-down version of the experience, but looks to make up for it by letting you bring friends, and taking the F2P route to putting the You Bastard into U-Boat. It's your job to hide, literally, under the radar to hit your enemy when they're least expecting it and be away before swift retaliation arrives to send you drowning to Davy Jones' endless locker.
There's no such thing as playing fair when you're the captain of a submarine.