The fourth installment of the Silent Hunter series, Wolves of the Pacific lets you skipper an American sub during WWII, visit her various stations and micromanage her crew.

A gorgeous game with great attention to detail and plenty of pretty explosions, the difficulty of it all is suppose to be scalable, so novices can jump in and play then tweak the setting to deeper intricacies on-the-fly, once they get the hang of it. Sadly, easy settings just seem to give you more time to die, and you pretty much have to figure out how to navigate and when to launch a torpedo from what depth on your own. Granted, there's probably no better way to learn such intricacies, but it can be tedious and frustrating. At least the controls are consistently intuitive throughout, even the when you don't know what half of them are for. Go ahead, fiddle and see what happens.

Your crew evolves (or "levels," RPG style) right along with you, as does your boat, in a video-gamey promote, swap-out and trade-up system.

Oddly, the game also sports some programming bugs out of the box that just up and crash the game outright (tested on Windows XP). Fixes (patches) have rolled out to remedy most issues (fingers crossed), but you'll need to download and install them.

In fact, Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific seems unready for prime time; missions often seem vague or contrary -- patrol where? Sink what? Okay. No? -- and the press of any key is a game of roulette where the game might just shoot itself in the foot and shut down (with a nice little apology built right in). Weird.

Still, when the game is firing on all cylinders, it makes submarinering a rather enthralling ordeal if you can get past the bewildering bits. Ubisoft is touting it as "accessible and empowering," and that'd be more true if they added "vexing."

So, though ultimately designed with casual accessibility in mind, where the uninitiated can still play point & shoot, Wolves of the Pacific is at its best as a meticulously involved naval warfare simulation. However, to really appreciate it, you'll need to be a naval warfare buff, relish a good vexing, and enjoy the view from bottom up -- or perhaps just like the idea of suicide by drown and crush.