I have personally waited a LONG time for a game like Uboat to finally hit consoles. I’ve often watched, and I subscribe to many YouTubers who play Uboat and other submarine simulator games on PC. I looked with envy at their choice of selection of games and wondered if there was ever going to be a console version.
Finally, a submarine simulator game has slipped right under the “asdic” radar (see what I did there?) of many and right onto the PlayStation Store. That game is Uboat from Ultimate Games, one of the best PC submarine simulators too.
Uboat and submarine simulator games are the types of games that require the buyer/player to really want to do this. This is the type of game where you need to be committed to the cause. For example, the online manual is a whopping 256 pages long! I’ve also seen YouTube guide videos to get new players up to speed as quickly as possible. These videos of “quick start guides” take, at a minimum, 30 minutes to 1 hour just to give you the basics on how to really play this game. There is A LOT to take in.
I could literally be here writing for hours about all the systems, mechanics, and gameplay options the game actually has and still not cover all of it.
I’ll start with the basics though. The graphics are excellent. You can tell this is a smaller studio on a smaller budget, but they hit bigger than their size would imply. The graphics, especially the water, which is especially important, are superb. The detail in the game with the animation of the crew, the layout of the submarines and the details are also excellent.
The game also has superb sound design. The “whoomph” of a torpedo launching or the distant sound of approaching propellers picked up by your radio operator are magnificent. It’s great that the game’s sound and visuals are good because they need to be for this sort of simulator to work.
The basic idea of the game is you play as the captain of a Uboat and are tasked with what would be real world orders from high command as per what would have happened in World War II. Orders could be, for example, to go to this location, patrol, meet up with another Uboat at this place and time, and sink an allocated amount of shipping in the process.
You can choose before you set off how much or little of the game you want to manage. There are three settings, for example, of how interactive you want to be with the crew. Crew morale plays a role in this game as well.
To play the game, you view each part of the ship as different screens. It’s very much a very elaborate point and click game. If you go to the con tower to look through the telescope, there are various controls to zoom in, out, etc. via moving your reticule over what you want changed.
Then, if you want to go to the torpedo room, the camera zooms back out and you get a third-person view of the torpedo room, and moving your arrow around the screen will highlight what you can interact with.
For me though, herein lies one of the issues the game has. I already knew before I started what I was going to see, but what I wasn’t expecting was how small on my TV screen all the really important dials, controls, and settings for the submarine were going to be. In short, this game looks to be a direct PC port but, crucially here, not optimized for console gamers.
Most console gamers I know play on big screen TVs a few feet away from their TV screen. Admittedly, my eyesight is not the best (I need reading glasses to read a book), but sitting where I normally would to play a console game (like most console gamers do) was too far away for me to see the details of dials and switches on-screen. You have to get a chair and get up close to the screen, like you would, well, as if you were playing on a PC.
The game’s UI also was messy and, again, made me feel there was no effort to optimize the game for console gamers. The game is also a bit “buggy”. For example, in the tutorial missions, you are tasked to go and talk with a crew member before setting off. The tutorial message on how to do that came up over the place where I had to click on an icon to speak to that person. I literally spent 30 minutes trying to get that message box to move/disappear so I could progress. I managed to do it in the end with a weird “press square and hold, then move the arrow and cross” maneuver.
Many other PS5 users have found bugs where the game crashes after about an hour and a half of play. I played through the tutorials, spent an hour and a half doing so, but then the game wouldn’t let me save my progress, despite pressing the right buttons, so I lost it all and had to start all over again.
My other real issue is that of micromanaging. I played this game to be a ship’s captain, not a nanny to the crew. When I order to go to 50 meters at silent running speed, I don’t expect to have to go to the various screens and dials myself to do it. There is, I feel, too much unnecessary fluff. The captain of the ship has enough on his plate as it is without having to worry about the morale of a tired crew member. The ship’s XO should be dealing with that, not me.
Despite the game’s awkwardness, it’s the experience it gives you that is worth the effort. There is so much involved in even doing the simplest of tasks, like just moving the boat, so that even simply completing the first couple of tutorial missions felt like a glowing achievement I could be proud of.
But then we get to the meat and potatoes of the game: going out into the oceans, tracking, firing, sinking targets and getting back to port. When you go to such efforts over hours of study to learn the game’s systems and mechanics, and you finally get into the right position, sort your firing solution, and fire your first salvo of torpedoes, the extreme, crushing sense of tension is physically palpable. I was on the edge of my seat literally the first time this happened.
Therein lies the beauty of the game. The world it has created is so magnificent, you can get a superb sense of achievement playing it. There are very few games that can do that. When the game works and you understand it, it really is quite something and very addictive.
Summary
Uboat, one of the best PC submarine simulators, has finally arrived on consoles. It’s, unfortunately, not tuned for console gameplay and feels like nothing more than a direct PC port. This brings along a whole load of issues, as well as many gameplay bugs, including crashes.
However, despite the humongous learning curve, despite the issues, when you do start to get a handle on the game, it gives you such a stunning experience that you forget the issues you had while getting there. The game will get patched to work and play better, which will only ease the experience for console gamers, but it’s a tough game to recommend for the moment.
Developer: Deep Water Studio
Publisher: Ultimate Games
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S
Release Date: 17th September 2025
