Ships

Genre: Machine Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Ships is a Simulation game that has players controlling all aspects of one of three different types of sea vessel, like the loading and unloading of cargo, piloting into and out of port, and management of emergency situations that develop onboard.

Visually, the ships and their cargo are all nicely detailed, and the ocean water looks nice as well, but to accomplish this the game takes up 2.7GB on your memory card, which is quite a hefty amount for a game that’s basically about procedural busywork.

As for the busywork itself… on the one hand, I have to give the game credit for giving players fine control over many parts of the ship processes that you wouldn’t otherwise think of. However, each and every one of these processes comes with a fatal flaw that makes it a pain to play.

Take ocean navigation, for example. In theory, this could be a fun and challenging task, but a slavish devotion to realism means that your ship is agonizingly slow to respond to commands, and you often won’t even see progress unless you speed the game up to its maximum capacity. Furthermore, the ocean itself is, as you might expect, completely featureless, meaning there are surprisingly long portions of the game where you are doing absolutely nothing. I was literally able to set my controller down for over three minutes as my ship crawled from one place to the next, and that was again with the game running at max speed.

Operating the crane to load and unload cargo seemed like it could be an interesting task, but again the thing works as slow as molasses on all but the top speed, and for some reason the game assigns the camera to the left stick, making the controls really awkward – even more so when you have to spin the camera around and the controls remain fixed in place, forcing you to press “right” to move up, down to move right, and so on. This works to make what could have been a relaxing task into a tedious and frustrating one.

What about ship repairs? Why, I see the game has you inspecting each individual part to… oh, you just repair parts with a press of a button and move on? Never mind. Crew management? Poor controls, poorly explained. Purchasing a growing number of ships and managing your business? You can only get one each of three types of ships, and you can’t manage the business on a macro level – every task you do has to be worked on directly by you.

The sad thing is, I could tell that there was some passion that went into Ships, some strong possibility that this game could really reach out and fulfill the desires of its admittedly very niche audience. However, in every single section of the game, poor design choices were made that rendered the game tedious, or boring, or confusing, or boring, or robbed it of potential to be something bigger, or that made it even more booooooring… Because of this, even someone absolutely aching for a ship simulation game is a person I would tell to not get their hopes up about Ships – I have a hard time picturing anyone enjoying Ships, even the most diehard shipping aficionado.

tl;dr – Ships is a Machine Simulation game that has you controlling all aspects of a shipping operation. Unfortunately, virtually every facet of this game is horribly flawed with poor design choices that make the game unnecessarily tedious, frustrating, or just outright boring. Even the very small target audience for this game is likely to be disappointed.

Grade: D

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