Depthcharge (Arcade)

While there aren’t enough games to really consider it a subgenre, there does seem to be quite a few video games that have a side view of the player dropping bombs down into the ocean to blow up passing submarines. While the only one I’ve covered so far is Canyon Bomber’s Sea Bomber secondary mode, before I took a look at any other games of a similar game type, I decided to look back at the grandfather of them all. Depthcharge, released in 1977 by Gremlin Industries, gave birth to this style of play, but unsurprisingly the first out of the gate doesn’t mean you’re the best at it.

Depthcharge has the player control a battleship poised atop the surface of the water, most of your view dominated by the depths below. Enemy submarines will come in from the left and right, each of them moving at different speeds depending on the layer of water they’re in and bearing different numbers to indicate the amount of points their worth. While the subs near the surface provide fewer points, they also move faster, meaning that they are still hard to hit even though you don’t need to plan your bomb dropping as carefully as you do for the slow moving and more valuable targets deep below. The submarines aren’t just targets though, as they can fire back up towards the surface with their own weapons, meaning you’ll have to move left and right for reasons other than dropping a depth charge in the right spot.

Earning points is more important than just trying to get a high score. During a regular play session of Depthcharge, you have a minute and a half to try and nail as many submarines as you can. However, if you can earn 500 points or more in that span of time, an extra 45 seconds will be added to your time playing, allowing you to get an even higher score than you otherwise could. Luckily, since the point values submarines provide are all factors of ten, it’s fairly easy to earn this time extension just by hitting a few high value targets like the 80 point sub that appears at the very bottom. The detection for whether or not your depth charge hits an enemy vessel is also fairly generous, the game treating them more like moving boxes when it comes to contact despite their sprite potentially not even touching it thanks to the sub’s shape.

However, while it is fairly easy to earn the time extension, you can’t just toss depth charges around with reckless abandon. You can only have six active in the water at one time. If you wish to drop another, one must explode either by hitting an enemy vessel or hitting the sea floor first. This means if you miss your targets you can end up waiting quite a bit to be able to throw more explosives down into the water, but this makes some sense as a way of discouraging you from playing carelessly. Oftentimes, even if you do miss a target high in the water though, the slow moving subs below seem to have a good change of puttering into your bomb, but there is one detail to this game I have kept from you up until now that completely ruins everything I have laid out here.

Depthcharge is obnoxiously slow.

While I have made mention that the submarines lower in the water take their time, everything in Depthcharge moves at a snail’s pace. The depth charges you drop into the water, should they not hit a single submarine on the way down, take twenty full seconds to reach the bottom and detonate, and in a game that’s ninety seconds long normally, you can definitely feel the sluggishness of these sinking bombs as you play. This likely plays into the game punishing you for being careless by making it take a long time for you to get your depth charge back, but it’s hardly the only slow thing in the experience. Those shots that fire up at you from the submarines pretty much have no chance of hitting you because you’ll always be able to see them coming so far in advance. The game can only display four enemy vessels at one time, and if they’re all in lower layers, there can be periods where you’re left sitting there, waiting and hoping your bombs will head down deep and hit their mark while there is literally nothing else to do but watch. The game does usually space the subs out so there’s one near the top and each new submarine is a little lower than the one above it, but if you miss the speedy one near the top then it’s time to sit back and watch the slowly drifting depth charge hopefully score a hit in the lower levels.

Despite definitely being obnoxious in its slowness, Depthcharge does manage to avoid being excruciatingly sluggish. Since the game values you lining up your shot and then releasing it, it’s less about quick action and more about calculating where to drop your depth charge. This does not alleviate the boring process of waiting for that explosive to make contact with the sub near the bottom of the screen, but needing to think about how you attack does at least mean Depthcharge is somewhat engaging with the player. By keeping the game’s sessions incredibly short even when overtime activates, it’s not a game that demands long term involvement either. It certainly raises a question of why players would come back to this arcade machine after seeing how slow everything is in the game, but if they have the attention span for it, Depthcharge’s systems at least all work, they just do so at their own unnecessarily pokey pace.

THE VERDICT: Depthcharge took a very simple game idea and killed a lot of its potential enjoyment by slowing down the action far too much. In a game that takes about two minutes if you get the time extension, having your explosives take twenty seconds to reach the bottom layer feels frustratingly slow. The speed is definitely meant to make you plan when to drop your limited depth charges and that strategic angle at least makes it possible to stomach putting up with Depthcharge’s pace for a bit, but the enemy subs having such slow shots as well means the one danger in this game might as well not exist. It’s really hard to justify shooting for a high score when the game moves at such a crawl, but its simplicity and short innings means you’ll only spend one quarter seeing what this game contains before you can seek out something exciting instead.

And so, I give Depthcharge for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. Depthcharge certainly teeters on the edge of being considered much worse, but the game is far too basic and over quick to really loath. If you do plan your depth charge dropping well there’s still that slightest payoff to your inputs that make you feel somewhat good about how you’re playing it, and many of the ideas featured in Depthcharge would have worked if the game just sped things up a bit. You could likely double the speed of how fast your explosives sink and how quickly the shots from enemies rise and the game would immediately be made more engaging without sacrificing the penalty for playing carelessly. The timer would still be so short that you can’t just throw explosives around as you please, and while the speed of enemy submarines would probably need a little adjusting too, Depthcharge really just needs to pick up the pace to have a hope of being something worth playing.

If you are interested in seeing the progenitor of this type of play, perhaps the best thing that can be said about Depthcharge is it is a harmless enough game to quickly play for its historical value. It’s not a big name or anything and the copycats never garnered much success either, but because Depthcharge is over quickly, you aren’t locked into spending much time watching its sluggish action unfold. If anything, it’s pretty easy to see the potential areas for improvement so you can grow to understand how games can benefit from iteration in the hands of other companies. It’s definitely not an arcade cabinet to seek out or really worth the quarter you’d need to play it if you’re looking for a fun time, but Depthcharge is a small but not wholly insignificant part of gaming history, and despite its obvious flaws, there are definitely older games that are far harder to play and lack even the small spark of a good idea Depthcharge has hidden behind its awful gameplay pace.