Steel Diver (3DS)

When a new video game system hits the market, the launch lineup is incredibly important, especially to early adopters of the system. However, while these games will influence who buys a system on release, many of these often fade into history despite their role in helping sell the system at its start. This likely stems from the fact a console usually launches with one or two tentpole titles and the rest are meant to provide a decent starting variety to entice different types of players. For the 3DS’s launch in the U.S., a submarine game was an odd part of the initial game offerings, but nowadays it might be better known now for the item it influenced in Super Smash Bros. than the game’s actual content. Submarine-focused games are certainly a niche with a limited audience so it’s not too surprising it fell out of its brief spotlight, but the important question is of course whether or not it succeeds within its genre.

Steel Diver surprisingly offers quite a few different modes for its submarine gameplay, but the main mode and the most interesting one would have be the Missions mode, this mode being the one that contains the game’s story and features the best execution of its gameplay. An unnamed rogue nation has been invading other countries, so to deal with them a few countries provide their best and brightest submarines and captains to form the Steel Divers. The Steel Divers head off to infiltrate underwater enemy bases, the rogue nation not only having an impressive aquatic military to deal with, but some unusually advanced technology that the submarines will have to do their best to defeat. Besides an odd deviation into fighting a sea monster at one point, Steel Diver sticks to its focus on the main obstacles to your mission being military opposition and the difficult task of navigating underwater environments.

The action in Mission mode is viewed from the side, the player only needing to worry about a few controls to keep their submarine moving. However, these controls require the player to be incredibly active and attentive at all times, as the environment they face can often be tight and packed with ways to damage your sub. Movement is handled by a set of sliders the player moves around, horizontal and vertical movement both going in the direction a slider is placed and speeding up to match how far it has been moved in a direction. Since you are in control of a giant hunk of underwater metal though, there is quite a bit of momentum and weight to account for in moving your vessel effectively, but after a bit of time with the Steel Divers, it can become surprisingly intuitive to control them, no doubt in part because of the tight and consistent physics. Because of these responsive controls, Steel Diver is able to make its levels designs fraught with danger, any contact with a wall or object damaging your sub or even causing it to spring a leak that will disable your controls until you can patch it up with your stylus. However, if you can find a place to surface, you can gradually recover your submarine’s health, this small accommodation further facilitating the presence of tight spaces and effective enemy subs. The Time Trials portion of Mission mode is even entirely focused on creating levels designed solely to provide difficult mazes that push you to mix precision and quickness. They are a bit utilitarian in design, but the game’s 7 story missions all shift up their environments quite a bit both in appearance and in what the sub will be asked to do. An arctic excursion will involve blasting an iceberg away and dodging moving ice, an underwater cavern contains falling rocks and statues you need to send crashing through the environment to open up paths, and man-made bases contain mines and gates blocking your progress forward.

Sadly, the seven story missions are hurt by the fact you will need to play through six of them with every sub. The first five missions don’t require any extra actions to unlock, but mission six and seven both require you to have cleared the previous missions once each with the three vessels that, while packing a few different abilities and stats each, don’t really change up how you play the level enough to justify the repetition. The smallest sub has a vertical torpedo and the two bigger subs can angle themselves to get around despite their sizes, but besides more missiles and health, the differences between them mostly just breaks down to slightly more difficult maneuvering. Once you know a level you can usually get through it quickly enough save for boss fights, but knowing them also makes them easier despite still taking some time. Some levels only require you to reach the end of the stage though and that can speed up repeat plays, but it still feels like repetition for the sake of it. The high score incentive tacked onto the mode certainly doesn’t make repeat runs any better, especially since it would require more thorough play rather than the speed-focused play that makes playing the levels again a bit more bearable.

There is one thing the repetition feeds into a little better, and that’s the second big style of play in Steel Diver: periscope play. At the end of a stage, you enter what is essentially a bonus round where the action changes from side-scrolling to a first person view through your sub’s periscope. Sitting in one position, you can rotate around in 360 degrees to see enemy ships or submarines that have you surrounded, the goal being to shoot down as many as you can within the time limit while also changing your elevation to dodge their retaliatory strikes. Taking down a ship or sub will reward you with an emblem that can be used to give your sub extra abilities or better stats in the missions, although you will need a lot of a single kind of emblem to be able to use it. This only really benefits from the repeated missions because the required emblem counts are made so high though, and even playing through with every sub once in every mission will likely leave you with barely any of the many emblem types available for use. Periscope is enjoyable on its own for its fast-paced action though, essentially being an aquatic shooting gallery, but in its own separate Periscope Strike mode, there are only three ways to play that, while different, end too quickly since the goal is just to eliminate all ships. Getting the hang for leading ships is the required skill here, but despite being fun in quick bursts, it would certainly need more variety if it had been given more room to enjoy.

Steel Diver’s last major mode is multiplayer, and while the other two modes have their flaws, they were at least somewhat enjoyable and simply weren’t structured to best make use of their ideas. The game’s multiplayer mode Steel Commander is just horrendously designed overall. It is similar in concept to Battleship, the player and either a game controlled opponent or another human taking turns on trying to eliminate each other, but not every ship on a side needs to be wiped out. Players are given three units in this mode, cargo ships that are essentially just the targets for your enemy to eliminate, submarines that can move between both sides of the battlefield and attack ships from below, and escort ships that can try and use depth charges to eliminate enemy subs. Neither player gets to see the placement of the enemy’s ships and has to suss them out by moving subs around to search for occupied spaces or using sonar to get a hint at nearby enemy locations, but you can only move a unit around the grid once per turn. This can drag out a game of Steel Commander, as there is little room for balancing defense and offense. If the enemy is pestering your cargo ship you probably want to move it so you don’t lose, and that’s your whole turn. They’ll probably spend their turn trying to pursue, so you’re likely stuck in a cat and mouse until the ship is gone or a player chooses to make a suboptimal move instead.

Limiting you to one move per turn wouldn’t necessary doom the mode if not for how slow and limited the play is. Were it purely strategy with set damage numbers, play could move rapidly to make up for the inevitable chases. Instead, when unit types interact, the game shifts away from a board game structure and into video game interactivity… at least for one player. If a sub is attacking a ship, whether they be the escorts that can fire back or the weak cargo ships, the player being attacked just sits there and watches. The player using the submarine gets to fire four torpedoes and has to be accurate in their use to deal damage, but if they’re inaccurate, that’s just another way the game drags. Even if they’re spot on every time though, that’s one player that just sits there and watches, but this is better than if a boat attacks a sub. Dropping a depth charge involves both players picking a depth from a small menu. If the submarine and depth charge match, the sub takes some damage. If they don’t then nothing happens save a slow cutscene of the failure. There is no way to really know what your opponent will pick making this nearly random to succeed at, but it also comes at the cost of revealing an escort ship to a sub so that the submarine can more easily eliminate it with its skill-focused mode of play. The best strategy ends up being ignoring as much of the game as possible and hoping your submarine can eliminate their cargo ships, because even though losing a sub is also a losing condition, the rock-paper-scissors style battle is so slow and tipped against the escort ships that you’ll likely lose your cargo ships while trying to win this way. This mode does get a surprising amount of love in plenty of different map shapes, but that’s likely because it’s not hard to design a new grid compared to the other modes that would require more thoughtful designs. The only thing this mode really has going for it though is it is entirely optional, meaning that there is still a hearty main game and this is only the heavily flawed multiplayer supplement.

THE VERDICT: Steel Diver tries to cover a few different possible ways of playing as a submarine, none of them being a true simulation but some of still them having appealing elements. The side-scrolling Mission mode is an enjoyable challenge of managing tight controls in some well designed underwater stages, but the need to repeat them to unlock new ones wears down the mode a bit. The periscope battles are fast-paced action that requires leading your torpedo shots to succeed, but it doesn’t have the amount of content needed to truly make use of the fun design. Both of these modes could have used more variety, but instead the effort went into an abysmally slow multiplayer mode that could have been a twist on the board game Battleship but is instead obnoxious in its terrible pace and lack of interactivity. The multiplayer is cordoned off enough that the single player missions and periscope battles can still make for a decent untainted experience, but still, a few too many ideas were attempted rather than the developers focusing on the ones with the most potential.

And so, I give Steel Diver for the 3DS…

An OKAY rating, but a conditional one. The multiplayer is certainly awful due to a structure that leads to absurd amounts of downtime, boring strategies, and random successes and failures, so if that was what interested you about Steel Diver, than it is definitely not worthy of an Okay rating. However, the main focus is definitely on its two better modes with the multiplayer just being a deeply flawed supplement you don’t have to engage with. Mission mode has a refined control method that makes navigation constantly involved and the main source of the challenge, but it stretches that content thin, the few gimmicks it does work in not really enough to sustain mandatory repetition. Periscope mode is an enjoyable shooting challenge, but its over all too soon and the game only has a few types of prey for you to face during it, meaning you’ll exhaust its content all too soon. The two better modes, funnily enough, have opposite problems, but this is just a result of the imbalanced approach to the different gameplay styles. It tried to be too much, and while that means some failures can be overlooked for the successes found in other areas of the game, those successes are too short-lived and simple to make the experience satisfying on the whole.

Even with Nintendo’s golden boy Shigeru Miyamoto at the helm, Steel Diver couldn’t quite find its footing. Funnily enough, the designer of legendary games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda was the designer of the game’s worst part here, Steel Commander specifically being his handiwork. Perhaps the lack of overall focus was what saved us from a singular Steel Commander mode, but even then its flaws could have been addressed if it had to carry the whole experience. Instead, we have a mix of flavors, some of them pleasant and some sour, but none of them strong enough to really make this sub game a standout title.