Action in the North Atlantic

Battle with steel and torpedoes — that's all you've got. Action in the North Atlantic will put you in the command cabin of a battle submarine somewhere in the middle of World War II, with the general ambition of getting you to experience the deepest submarine experience you can imagine in 1989.

It's a combination of tactical strategy and underwater shooting. You command a submarine — map, data on enemy ships, depth and course, you have to manage it all without dramatic gestures. The goal is simple: find a convoy, surface just in front of it, fire torpedoes and then disappear before the Navy washes you away with the ocean. The game unfolds in a window with traditional DOS-style graphics — monochrome lines, symbols instead of pictures, digits almost everywhere.

You play more on paper than on nerves. You're not the player who shoots from the hip; you're a planner who calculates angles, distances and time. Torpedoes travel a long way, the enemy moves, you have to guess where it will be in a moment. If you miscalculate, the torpedo misses and you're in trouble — the convoy starts hunting and your submarine won't be very nimble. Control is matter-of-fact and tedious; it's not about clicking frantically, it's more about entering commands and reading numbers on the display.

In the nineties this simulation was attractive mainly to those with a passion for sea warfare and who were reluctant to lift their hands from the keyboard. Today you can rediscover it only if you want to feel how war was fought without graphics, without animation, without whipped cream on top — just with logic and paper in your hand. The game has aged, of course, beautifully: now it's more like a puzzle in burlap wrapping.

If you're looking for tactical fun without unnecessary acceleration and you're a strategist yourself, take a look at it. It's not a hit that will keep you until sunrise, but it's honest work you can play in a browser and feel the spirit of an era when strategy was written in the command line and every number on the screen meant life or death.