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Dive to the Titanic (PC)

When I first saw this game on the Steam marketplace, I was hesitant. I thought to myself, “Surely this must be a terrible game made by poor Ukrainians!” However to my surprise, it was actually made by poor Germans.

Let me give you a little background: as the name implies, you command a submarine tasked with bringing back photographs and artifacts from the wreck of the Titanic. You explore most of the ship in brilliant, accurate environments that are legitimately spooky at times.

When I began playing, I was appalled by the horrid controls and voice acting. In time, though, I learned that these problems could be remedied by muting the vocal audio and changing nearly the entire control scheme. Once this task was completed, I found myself with a deeply satisfying game. The atmosphere of it all was so perfect, it really did capture the feeling of being locked in a box nearly 2.5 miles under the waves.

The feeling that came over me when I first saw the wreck was intense. I honestly felt chilled, it felt real. It really pushed the point across that hundreds died here, and the ship had almost as much soul as the people who perished there. Everything from going through old cabins, to seeing the crows nest and captain’s quarters felt as if it had been used and lived in. I think that could be a major accomplishment for any title, especially one who is going into unexplored territory such as Dive to the Titanic.

I’m afraid the sweetness ends there, however. After a 3-6 hour campaign, the last mission tasks you with getting back to the surface after a cataclysmic collision with the Titanic. As your submarine takes on water, loses power, and shortly after that oxygen, you need to play a sort of “power the generator” mini-game in which you press a button in a certain pattern that makes your battery come back to life. The mini-game sucks private parts and is broken. There is no discernible way to know what the pattern is you are supposed to be pressing. I replayed the segment over twenty times to get the same result: death. For such a gem, it would have been nice if the developers had given the me a bit more information on just how to press a certain button for an otherwise mundane mini-game.

Despite such shortcomings, I believe that Dive to the Titanic did a good job with the cards it was dealt. It is certainly a good title for anyone looking for a bit of a fun time-waster.