Simulation games have always been popular in the gaming industry. Many simulation games have been released over the years, and all gamers have probably played this type of game at least once.
Even though many games in this genre have been released to date, the absence of a ship simulator is felt among them, and gamers pay less attention to these games compared to car and flight simulators.
Ships Simulator game was released in 2017 for PC, in 2022 for Xbox, and finally in late 2023 for PlayStation.
At the beginning of the game, you can buy a cargo ship with the initial money that the game gives you. Then, you need to repair it and start your first mission.
SHIPS AND MISSIONS
There are three types of watercraft that you can buy: the cargo ship, the construction rig, and the heavy-duty lifting ship.
The game has 24 missions, and after completing all of them, the 25th mission (a special mission) will be unlocked for you.
Cargo ship: In two missions, you only work with a crane and move the ship’s loads. In two missions, you take the ship from one point to another. In one stage, you pull the ship with a tugboat and then take the ship to where the game wants you. In the remaining three missions, you put out a fire on the ship, rescue crew members from drowning, and fight pirates.
Construction rig: This has eight missions in which you do things like installing a wind turbine, repairing a ship, installing a bridge, etc.
Heavy lifting ship: This one has eight missions too, and in each mission, it requires you to pick up something from the middle of the sea and take it to the marked location.
GAMEPLAY
The gameplay of the cargo ship is very boring, I set the speed of the ship to max and set the direction of the ship to the direction that the yellow arrow in front of the ship showed, then put the controller down and started walking in my room and sometimes I looked at the monitor screen and once or twice there were hills which blocked the way and I had to cross them by turning left and right and put the controller down again until when I reached the destination, the sea had no waves and the ship never deviated from the course it was going, no challenges except one or two hills. There was no effect around the ship to show that the ship was moving, and if I was in a part of the sea where there was nothing on the right and left side of the ship, it was not clear whether the ship was stationary or moving.
The loading and unloading missions were just repetition, carrying the crane hook from one side to the other and that’s it.
The mission that you should put the fire out: the camera will switch to top-down, there are white and black squares on the ship with the shape of fire on them, squares with human shape (crewmates) and squares with fire extinguisher shape, you should select the crewmate squares and then select the fire extinguisher and when the crewmate reached the fire extinguisher select the square with fire shape to put it out, the dry and annoying controls have made these missions very difficult and unpleasant, the pirate mission and rescue mission are both similar to the fire mission. In the construction rig missions, you have to move the rig with the d-pads and reach the marked location, and then use its cranes to move things, and the construction rig missions are more of a crane simulator rather than ship simulator. In the Heavy Duty lifting ship missions, you have to move with controls similar to the cargo ship, and after reaching the marked location, by pressing the square button the part that carry the cargos of the ship goes under water and moves with controls similar to Construction rig, then you should move it to under the object on the water and then by pressing the square button again the ship will come back to the water surface and carry the object you picked up, and then you should move the cargo to the marked location with the same boring controls and gameplay from the first cargo ship. The ship repair section is just a menu with the names of the parts of the ship, and if they need to be repaired, you must repair them, for this you only need to select the part that has a problem from the menu and press the X or triangle button, and after repair the repaired part will just be cleaned and nothing more. The ability to increase the speed of the gameplay up to 4x was very good, and if it wasn’t there, ships simulator would be completely unplayable. It takes between 3 to 3.5 hours to complete the entire 25 levels of the game and the 15$ price tag doesn’t seem reasonable at all, although I was really glad it was short because I couldn’t stand this game any longer.
VISUALS
The visuals are very awful, low resolution, very low quality and low resolution textures that I think the resolution of the textures is 360p or 480p, all the things you see in the game have their pixels visible and it is very annoying. The sea water is as if it is a flat stone surface and has nothing similar to the water, the water does not react to anything even the movement of ships on it, and even there were many bugs that made it difficult and annoying to see and it wouldnt get fixed with restarting the game. In 2017, there were many games for smartphones whose visuals were far better than this game.
The sound design is low quality and noisy and causes headaches in the rainy mission.
CONCLUSION
The gameplay and controls are boring and annoying and there is no challenge in the game, the content of the game is very little and it can be finished in less than three and a half hours, the visuals are bad and unbearable, half of the missions have nothing to do with ship simulator at all, the sound quality is low. I do not recommend this game at all.
It was great, the game itself was not interesting, but it became interesting with your review. I am glad that I read your review. Keep it up, the next reviews will definitely be great.
Glad you liked it!