Under the Ice

The game takes place in an analog of the GIUK gap, with Iceland roughly centered in the upper half of the map. Clicking anywhere on the map zooms in on that area, a button in the upper left zooms out again.

Submarines appear on the map as large icons, which sometimes obscure other nearby boats unless zoomed in. Player-side boats are selected by clicking on them, causing a rectangle to appear around it and various details appear in a separate display area at the bottom of the screen. Three sections of the lower display allow the user to select and activate the various sensors, fire weapons, and launch acoustic decoys.

Computer Gaming World reviewed the PC version in their May 1989 edition. They were relatively happy with the quality of the simulation itself, and its realism, although they cautioned that this was a game that would appeal to the "true submarine buff and not to the general gaming public." Their main concerns were "the paucity of documentation and the resulting slow learning curve" due to the manual not explaining many of the underlying concepts that the player would have to discover through trial and error.

ST-Log reviewed the game in their July 1989 edition. The author was a naval officer with ten years in submarines, and was fairly critical of the game in many of its technical details. More of his concern was aimed at the game's interface, noting the annoyance of needing to delete waypoints in order to change their speed or depth, and how slightly missing a click on an icon will cause an inadvertent zoom. But his largest complaint was the speed of the display, "If you're used to animation that moves smoothly, or even semi-smoothly, the complete redraw of the screen every two seconds will annoy you. Having to wait for the program to accept commands may also drive you nuts."