Old Gamers Never Die: Revisiting Campaigns in 'Cold Waters'

A Chinese destroyer is hit by a torpedo in this "low-light" periscope view in Cold Waters. (All of the illustrations are actual screengrabs from sessions of Cold Waters, and all game design elements are © 2017 Killerfish Games

As you know, one of my favorite computer games of recent vintage is Killerfish Games’ Cold Waters (2017), a submarine warfare simulator that was inspired by MicroProse Software’s classic “subsim” Red Storm Rising (1988).

I bought Cold Waters nearly two years ago during Steam’s Fourth of July Sale for 2020. I had added the game to my “wish list” on Steam (just as I have MicroProse’s Regiments and Second Front on my wish list now) in 2017 because I thought paying $49.99 or more when the game was new and buggy was a bit too much for my taste. Eventually, though, Steam offered it at a price that I could afford, and by 2020 all the “bugs” and kinks in the game had been fixed.

For the better part of my time playing Cold Waters, I avoided playing the Campaigns (the game has three of these). Campaigns In Red Storm Rising and Silent Service II were the last thing I tackled when I played those games – they’re usually the hardest section of a computer war game to beat, even on Easy difficulty level, and I still, in 2022, have not played all of the Single Battles in Cold Waters.

Finally, late in 2020 and into early 2021, I played the NATO vs. Soviets (1984) and US vs. China (2000) campaigns. Both in Easy difficulty, mind you, and I played the 2000 one first because it features more modern submarines and warships that were in service with the navies depicted in Cold Waters.

I wrote extensively about both campaigns on my WordPress blog at the time, and I don’t have the time – or the moxie – to write about them here in detail. Suffice it to say that I finished both campaigns and won many decorations for valor while doing so, but I still lost submarines – and presumably crew members – in the process.

The last time I played through a Cold Waters campaign was in March of 2021, and even though Cold Waters features three campaigns (there’s a 1968 variant of NATO vs. Soviets, but I don’t do too well with submarines and U.S. Navy weapons of the 1960s, so I skip that one), I only play two of them.

Today I figured I’d try starting another campaign; I played through a World War III land campaign recently on M1 Tank Platoon, so I thought I’d give the NATO vs. Soviets (1984) one another playthrough. However, I did not do so well on my first mission – I sank one of two super-quiet diesel-electric subs, but I only sent the escort sub to the bottom of the sea, not the cruise missile sub that I’d been ordered to destroy.

To add insult to injury, I lost my boat in my second mission, and when my crew and I abandoned ship, the Russians captured us.

That was not fun.

Here's a screengrab from a previous campaign. Note how gorgeous the graphics are in Cold Waters. 

So, instead of giving up, I chose to start another South China Sea campaign (US vs. China – 2000).

I only played one mission – it seems that whenever I try to “do” more than one mission per day, I fail miserably at the second mission. And today I am tired anyway, so I decided to just go through the first mission and then quit.

As it happens, my first assignment in the South China Sea campaign happened to be one of my favorite scenarios – to intercept a Chinese invasion fleet heading toward Taiwan. The (in-game) weather was miserable, and as a result, getting exact sensor readings was difficult. But I tried to use reasonable tactics against the Chinese task force, and in the end, all the enemy ships ended up going glub, glub, glub to the sea bottom.