IronWolf VR is the Ultimate World War 2 Submarine VR Experience on PCVR | IronWolf VR Review

If you’ve ever wanted to live the quiet tension of hunting the high seas for vulnerable merchant ships, dodging enemy Destroyers and launching torpedoes from under the ocean waves, then IronWolf VR is the game for you. For a game that fully immerses you in life as a submarine captain hunting merchant ships during World War 2, there is no better experience.

World War 2 VR Submarine Immersion

The controls are all old timey WW2 dials wheels, switches, and gauges. Each you have to manipulate with your actual hands, as any good VR game would have you do, sometimes in a frantic hurry to dive as quickly as possible after hearing the roar of planes searching for you overhead, and sometimes with cold calculation as you line the crosshairs of your periscope over an unsuspecting vessel.

This game is excellent at what it is trying to achieve, an easy to learn and semi realistic depiction of World War 2 convoy raiding as an Axis submarine. It has a great tutorial, though it could use a little expansion to cover some necessary topics (like how to repair leaks in your hull with the blowtorch). Still, IronWolf VR is easy to pick up and learn, while also being hard to master.

A Fully Realized Submarine

Each room of your cramped submarine is fully and beautifully realized in Virtual Reality. Moving from one to the other always involves turning a wheel on a door or opening a hatch, before you are teleported into the adjoining room. Each has a high level of detail. Everything you need to use or read to run your Submarine is clear to see, while also giving the feeling of being in a dingy steel tube floating beneath the waves.

Even the sound conveys this, with the splashes of depth charges hitting the water and the underwater booms that follow. The roar of your diesel engine is replaced with the quiet humming of your electric propulsion as you sink lower beneath the waves. The creaks of your hull as the pressure of the water around you threatens to crush it while you sink lower and lower under the water. The sound is what elevates IronWolf VR to a fully immersive and sometimes even scary experience.

There are all sorts of things to do inside your Submarine. Navigate in the command room, lock on to targets, fire and guide your torpedoes in the weapons room. Load torpedoes in the torpedo room, and manage the speed and engines in the engine room. You can even go outside when your sub is above the water, where you can shoot the Deck gun and machine gun.

Side note, the deck gun is insanely satisfying to shoot. It has a great report and really satisfyingly slams back when you pull the lever to fire it. You also have to load each shell before you do, and it is a lot of fun. Unfortunately firing your deck gun isn’t often a very smart move in a submarine, but it’s great when you get the chance to pick off a helpless ship, or desperately damaged enemy.

Oh, and if you don’t have a crew of three other friends who want to play this game, and this sounds like too much for one person to manage, you would be right. Luckily there are automation options you can turn on so that you can manage the sub alone, or with fewer than four total people. IronWolf VR is great in multiplayer, and working with a crew is a fun time, but it is just as satisfying as a solo experience.

Patience Required

Though it is very satisfying, the hardest part of IronWolf VR is the waiting for that satisfaction. Sometimes everything just seems to take a little too long once you get the hang of the game. Your Sub moves extremely slowly underwater, which is where you will be spending most of your time. This makes positioning your Submarine a very time consuming experience, and so is running away from pursuit.

Firing some torpedoes to sink a couple of ships before slipping away underwater is great, and so is the quiet tension of listening to depth charges sinking and exploding, and maybe rocking your whole ship and ringing your ears if they are too accurate. Getting away afterwards though, is a real test of patience. Ships in pursuit will constantly ping around with sonar, meaning you need to go up and down and try to slowly, extremely slowly, sail away.

Sometimes this means you will be forced to wait below periscope depth with no power and nothing to do for very long tens of minutes while your hunters lose track of you and wander away. Especially in Virtual Reality, this is extremely tedious. There’s nothing to do but examine deck panels with your flashlight and play with a compass. The one department in which IronWolf VR is extremely lacking is the amount of waiting it can take to successfully pull off the escape from an ambush or battle.

The second department is welding. Playing a solo mission means that leaks in your hull are your biggest adversary, because you have to weld them yourself, and it takes a very long time. You will get a lot of leaks, basically any time your World War 2 era Submarine takes damage.

This means that you’ll be spending a lot of time staring at the bright end of your welding torch while you wait for the leak to stop. Playing IronWolf VR with multiplayers makes this a non issue, but for solo missions it is a huge chore, and means you will end up drowning due to leaks far more often than losing due to your hull being destroyed.

The Quiet Wolf of the High Seas

There are pre defined missions as well as an open world map that you can prowl around in and find unsuspecting convoys to raid. The open world system gives a sense of progression with upgrades that can be applies to your WW2 Submarine, and requires you to manage additional resources like your number of torpedoes and reserves of diesel fuel.

This means that in the open world not only do you not have to destroy every ship you come across before you flee to strike another day, but you also won’t want to put your ship at risk. You will need to go to port when you run low on fuel or torpedoes, and to repair damage to your hull. Each engagement has a greater sense of risk to it, a feeling that what you’ve been working towards is put more at risk. The additional longevity this adds to the experience can be very rewarding if you put the time in.

The predefined missions are just as fun, and are a great way to get acquainted with the game before jumping into the open world. The missions are very fun if you just want to jump into something quickly without all the prerequisite map navigation that the open world requires. Not to mention some of the missions are very hard and offer a great challenge right out of the box.

The Tactics of Submarine Warfare

Simply gunning directly for the nearest enemy ship and launching torpedoes or firing with your deck gun won’t get you very far. You need to master the art of dodging enemy Destroyers, and optimally position your sub so that your torpedoes have a good chance to strike their target. As a submarine you are slow, but have the great advantage of stealth to properly position yourself for a killing blow before scurrying into the depths once again.

Whatever your prey is, there are a lot of ways to approach each situation, and careful scouting of and positioning towards your targets is vital for victory. IronWolf VR is just as much about the tactical considerations of how to attack and retreat than the physical management of the systems of your Submarine in the VR environment.

Do you go for the destroyer at the lead of the convoy first, or do you pick off the merchant ships from behind and try to flee deep underwater before it catches up with you? Do you come around and try to destroy the Destroyer now hunting you, or pull away and come back to strike again when it thinks you are gone? Do you go to the surface and try to finish off a wounded ship with your deck gun, or use another torpedo just to be sure it sinks?

The convoy raiding experience as a World War 2 Submarine has never been more immersive in beautiful Virtual Reality, with all the sunshine of the Ocean and the dingy depths of your Submarine. If you’ve always wanted to be a Wolf out in the water, then try IronWolf VR. Just make sure you don’t mind waiting around a bit.