Review: Ship Simulator Extremes

Ahoy, Captain! Your ships are ready and you can leave immediately. No, this isn’t a simple game about pirates. This is a realistic ship simulator with different missions. You can take action with Greenpeace, transport tourists on a luxury cruise ship or make a ride with a motorboat. There are more than 200 missions, and every mission take a considerable long time.

This review is also available in Dutch. Deze recensie is ook beschikbaar in het Nederlands.

Developer: VStep
Publisher: Paradox Interactive
Release: 27-08-2010
Platforms: PC
Genre: simulation
Languages: English, German and Spanish

Ship Simulator Extremes:

The trailer and screenshots of Ship Simulator Extremes look very nice. Unfortunately, SSE doesn’t make its expectations true. In the beginning you stand in the harbor with a designated boat and you can leave. On the chart is a star, which tell you which way you have to go. The boat isn’t easily steerable. Also, it takes very long time till you reach the star en than you have to plot the boat, which is difficult because your boat isn’t at the right position or your boat is too far from the dock. This is very frustrating. By another mission you have to plot on another boat. You have too stay next to the boat and hold the indicated speed, at first you can’t stay their correctly because the other boat is moving and second their is no indicated speed. The missions duration is also very long, it’s too long and it seems an eternity till you reached the star. And than, when you at the star, you don’t know exactly how to go further. You can also crash to the harbor or another boat, and than you sink, very slowly. Sometimes it happens that you sail trough the land! Very sloppy, because they could solve this bug. It’s by the way the only bug in the game.

There are a couple of harbors in the game. All the missions begin by the Rotterdam Harbor. It looks very real, compared to the real harbor. But it has to be, it’s a simulator. In the screen you can choose a camera position, above the ship, behind the steering wheel/rudder or free walking on the ship. This is a nice addition to the game. Only, if you sit behind the steering wheel/rudder, you can’t see very much!

In Ship Simulator Extremes you can choose in the menu between campaign, free roaming, single mission and multiplayer. With campaign you just follow the missions. Those are considerable long, one mission take at least two hours. Fortunately you can save the missions, to go further at another time. With free roaming you can sail around the whole world, you just have to choose weather conditions and in what harbor you would like to start. But free roaming will be quite boring after a while. With single mission you can play a single mission. And with multiplayer you can play online. Unfortunately it doesn’t work well, if you connect to the server, the game says you have to register a code somewhere, but where? No idea.

In the game isn’t any music, except for the menu. One track, but that is enough for this game. It’s a nice track which is perfectly connected to the game. During the game there are realistic sounds, as example, the water. The graphics look nice, there are no sloppy finishes or pixels. Ship Simulator Extremes contains different story lines and different ‘chapters’. With Greenpeace you can campaign and with tourists you can transport tourists, but all the mission in a chapter has a different story. The stories are nice. But it’s not the main thing where the game is about. The game is about what the title says: ship simulator.

Conclusion: