Steel Diver

Genre: Action / Shooting Gallery

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Wireless)

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Review:

Steel Diver, not to be confused with its sequel/spinoff game Steel Diver: Sub Wars, is an Action game released alongside the Nintendo 3DS at launch in 2011. This makes sense, as the game was first demonstrated as a tech demo when the platform was revealed, making it one of the first things created for the Nintendo 3DS. This game has players using touchscreen controls on the bottom screen to control the 2D side-scrolling movement of a submarine on the top screen.

The presentation in Steel Diver is good, albeit not especially impressive – the 3D visuals on the top screen look nice and make good use of stereoscopic 3D, while the bottom screen’s controls are a nice facsimile of what one might imagine a real submarine control panel to look like, but still accessible and easy for the average player to instantly understand. Also, the music sounds appropriately dramatic, though not especially memorable. You’ll have some laughably bad voice work warning you when you take damage, too. All in all, this is a presentation that gets the job done, but doesn’t stand out.

When it comes to gameplay, Steel Diver is a bit of an odd game for the Action genre, in that it is a very slow-paced and deliberate game. The combined forces of inertia and momentum underwater and the physics of moving a submarine mean that any changes you make may take a few seconds to be fully-realized in the game, and this leads to a need for players to anticipate movements ahead of time rather than responding to situations as they arise. As a result, the game encourages a slow, meticulous pace over simple reflexive actions. Not everyone is going to be thrilled with this lack of direct control.

Making this game even more niche is the nature of those controls, as players will be controlling their submarine almost entirely using touchscreen controls on a simulated interface, with the touchscreen giving players sliders and buttons to control their submarine as if they were piloting a real-life machine. In theory, this is an outstanding idea that could make for a lot of immersion. However, in practice these controls are fiddly, and players won’t want to manipulate them with their fingers, something that would seem more natural. Rather, you’ll need to play this game using a stylus to make sure you’re pressing the right spot on the screen to control the ship, something that breaks this immersion the game is trying to build.

This game also has a game mode where players use gyroscopic motion control to look 360 degrees around them, with this mode acting as a sort of Shooting Gallery game. While the gameplay here is fun, it’s also somewhat shallow and doesn’t have enough depth to meet its full potential.

There are other issues too. For a full-priced game, Steel Diver is depressingly short, beatable within a span of 3-5 hours depending on just how defensive your “driving” is. In that time, the gameplay will be somewhat repetitive too, though the game does at least break things up a bit with a first-person perspective minigame that has you fending off attacking battleships, with players turning their periscope 360 degrees using the Nintendo 3DS’s gyroscopic motion controls. It’s gimmicky, sure, but it is a fun little distraction all the same.

Even so, for $40 you would expect more than a 3-5 hour acquired taste of a game with a fun little minigame. Steel Diver is definitely not bad, and it tries to do some unique and interesting things within its genre. However, these interesting things never build up to a truly great game – it still feels somewhat like a glorified tech demo.

tl;dr – Steel Diver is an Action game that has players using the touchscreen to control the 2D side-scrolling movement of a submarine. There are some unique ideas here, and even a fun minigame, but this game’s deliberate, sluggish gameplay and short length make it an acquired taste that isn’t going to be worth the price for most gamers.

Grade: C-

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