Silent Hunter II gives the player the command of a German U-boat during the Second Battle of the Atlantic. The game offers single-player and multiplayer missions. In addition to some separate single-player missions, they also come as a string in the theme of "U-boat highlights", allowing the player to re-experience such well-known adventures as sinking as, retrieving the war diary from the and Operation Drumbeat against Americanshipping. German World War II veteran and sub commander Erich Topp was one of the game's technical advisers, and a series of interviews with him appears in the game. Silent Hunter II was developed with multi-player support as a notable feature. Players were able to connect with other Silent Hunter II players, and engage in sub vs. sub combat. Furthermore, connectivity to the separate game Destroyer Command was available, which enabled sub and surface ship combat.
History
Silent Hunter II was originally being developed by Aeon Electronic Entertainment, the developers of Silent Hunter, but they had to leave the project unfinished, and Ultimation Inc. finished it. After considerable delays it was released in November 2001 after three years of work. After release, instability with the multiplayer feature was found to be commonplace, yet Ubisoft never resolved this issue by releasing another official patch. While in 2002 Ubisoft had ended the official support, they authorized and enabled the game's community at Subsim.com to fix the game themselves by giving them the source code. The fan communityraised over $7000 for an unofficial patch development project called Projekt Messerwetzer which ultimately fixed the issues. Since then, unofficial expansion packs like the World War II Pacific war theatre-based total conversation "Pacific Aces" were released by community. In June 2009, after many years of commercial non-availability, the game got re-released on the digital distributor gog.com.
Reception
Silent Hunter II received "average" reviews according to video game review aggregator Metacritic. A Subsim review rated Silent Hunter II 80/100 in 2005 and named it "the new WWII subsim benchmark".
