![]() However, Ships Simulator is a game which is so basic, bland and unimaginative that you may end up abandoning ship altogether, depending on how committed you are to grabbing those achievements. This is why Microsoft Flight Simulator works, because it’s such a nice place to be despite the pace being slow and steady. Some may find the gameplay in sims dry, but usually this is evened out by immersive visuals to suck you into the world. What’s worse is that when you go under the surface and position the camera up, the waterline disappears completely and becomes entirely transparent. It simply flows undeterred in a predetermined fashion. At first it doesn’t look too bad, until you realise that your vessel’s movements make no change or disturbance to the water at all. However, what is fundamentally important for a sim game all about ships is the water. The colour palette just looked drab, and rather ironically, washed out. My blocky cargo ship was made up of slightly different-coloured rectangles (all shades of red), and light strobed randomly in an attempt to simulate a storm. There is a particular mission set at night which somehow looks even worse. You can see the skyline slowly paint itself into view as you approach, and can even control it with the rotation of the camera and then erase it again like the Google camera gimmick. The rendering is abysmal, with ships and rocks materialising right next to you, before disappearing without warning. Granted that’s a high bar, but there’s no excuse for how ugly Ships Simulator is. That was released nearly twenty years ago, and looks a million times better than this. I mean, I remember buying Half Life 2 for the Xbox and being impressed with how good it looked on console. Regardless of everything, my biggest issue with Ships Simulator is that it looks absolutely woeful. Yep, that’s all you’ll be doing for those eight missions. The final craft is a little more interesting, in that you can submerge it and then resurface to dredge items and carry them off to the docks. If it wasn’t for each achievement being worth a generous 100G, I would say there was no point in bothering with it. ![]() And again, connecting your hook is incredibly fiddly and requires you to be precise.Īpart from the items differing cosmetically, and sometimes needing to be positioned underwater, the actual gameplay doesn’t vary at all. This is the most laborious of the mission sets, as all you we are tasked with doing is picking items up from location A, and placing them at location B. Things would have been a little better if it was controlled by the left thumbstick, not the right one as it feels unnatural.Īnyhow, the second ship comes equipped with twin cranes. But no matter what speed the action is moving at, I always seemed to be spinning my camera around wildly, struggling to get a grasp of what the hell was going on. In fact, I have no idea why the x1 and x2 speeds exist because they are agonisingly slow. You can ratchet things up from x1 to x4 speed, but even this is nowhere near quick enough. Standing idly by as pirates bomb your ship is not very helpful. Fighting off pirates actually means you need to direct your crew to man water cannons, but trying to decipher who is where and get them to actually follow your commands the first time is something of a lottery. Docking successfully consists of slowly guiding your ship into a yellow target zone, and makes for an excruciatingly drawn out affair. Unfortunately the controls are a mess, and incredibly sensitive. These were by far the most enjoyable and least repetitive missions, and actually felt like a compilation of mini games more than anything else. You’ll be in charge of a cargo tanker for the first batch, loading containers, docking successfully and even fighting off pirates. Want to win a 12 month Xbox Live Gold subscription? Enter now!Įach mission varies slightly in length, but it’s safe to say they are all on the short side. ![]()
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