If you'll excuse the pun...one of the greatest injustices is that this game failed to get noticed.
Deep Fighter is a cross between Freespace and Monkey Island. Plenty of shooting with just the right amount of puzzle solving, its not a combat sim, its an adventure game.
And the adventure is one that you can lose yourself in, and the ending will leave you wanting more.
The graphics are wonderful. The submarine models are dazzlingly colourful while the underwater environment is suitably murky. The overall textures and details are not something that would have been expected at the time, it took playstation graphics two years to catch up to this game. The monsters are extremely well done, I know more than one arachnophobe who shudders at the sea spiders. The combat is great, the developers managed to make your fighter feel like a spitfire and the cruisers like World War era battleships.
There is one thing that lets the game down and that is the god-awful FMV. A mixture of third hand actors only ever seen in commercials and bit parts practically belch out lines in front of terribly done blue screen. But you can always skip the FMV right? Unfortunately it is now too late for this game, as it is rarely available, most PC's won't run it, and the Dreamcast is dead. Its a shame this didn't get a devoted community of modders like Freespace 2 did, otherwise they would have been able to reinvigorate this game and push it up to the glory it always deserved, but never got.