Steel Diver was a bad business decision. I don’t know how it happened, but someone up top thought three small games packed together would have been better than one large, in-depth game. As a result, gullible schmucks (such as myself) ended up wasting $40* on three separate prototypes while procuring a Nintendo 3DS on launch day.

For the most part, the AR games included with the system make for a better time.

That’s not to say that I was lying in my PAX East preview of the game. The periscope mode I played was a lot of fun, and it certainly had potential. The problem is Nintendo misdirected their attention. The primary focus of gameplay is a boring and stale side-scrolling mode whose only catch is how difficult it is to steer a submarine. Commands must be input ahead of time or else the player will be colliding into walls at each corner. In some ways this could be enjoyable, but on the whole it’s just a long and tedious process.

Aquatic combat fails to be exciting in any possible way. There’s no real method for attacking enemy subs without exposing yourself to attack yourself, and as a result it’s just a much better plan to avoid your foes altogether. That is, until they force you to fight some inexplicable giant sea monster. The fights are based on precision and timing, both of which are difficult when trying to manuever a slow and lumbering machine.

The only highlight to the campaign is the periscope mini-game between each mission. This mode can also be played separately, but unfortunately it never really progresses to more depth than Duck Hunt. Ultimately, combining the concept of the side-scroller (navigating environments with laggy and tricky submarine controls) may have been more enjoyable, and even more tense, if kept in the first-person periscope mode. Unfortunately they never really build on it, and instead it is kept as a small mini-game.

The third game type is perhaps the most enjoyable, and whose downfall is its own simplicity. The Steel Commander game type combines Minesweeper with Battleship, where the focus is to guess and figure out the enemy’s location. Key to victory is to either destroy the other team’s submarine, the only ship capable of traversing into enemy waters and learning the enemy location, or to sink all of their supply ships.

Due to its simplistic nature, each round can be completed in much the same way. Send your sub to the other side, wait a bit to sonar, and find the enemy’s supply ships. Once you get into the flow of things you pretty much just rinse and repeat for each fight.

Despite this major handicap, however, it is easily the most exciting and enjoyable part of Steel Diver. It is also perhaps the only game-mode that captures in any way what it is like to be in a submarine. When being attacked by enemy ships a depth charge is dropped, and the player must select a depth that is hopefully different from that chosen by their surface-sailing foe. Just watching that depth charge descend, awaiting for its explosion, is reminiscent of films like U-571 or Hunt for Red October, where there is nothing but suspenseful silence as all the sailors await their potential demise.

If there is any justification in a purchase of Steel Diver, it is merely for the Steel Commander game mode. Unfortunately it is not a deep or complex enough experience to justify a full $40 on. Whatever experiment Nintendo was pulling with this game, it completely failed. Judging by the graphics it was a regular DS game forced into being a launch title, the 3D effect is hardly noticable (until your eyes begin to bleed) and the two simplest distractions from the main campaign are also the only fun part about it.

Nintendo would be better off repackaging Steel Commander as its own downloadable title.