Thank you Ultimate Games for providing us with a review code!

In my humble opinion, I feel that a ship salvaging simulator is one of the more “valid” simulators to exist. Dismantling ships and selling the scrap for profit is something that very few people will ever have the chance to do. So it’s pretty cool that it now exists in a video game format.

Ship Graveyard Simulator is a first-person simulation game where you live on the land of a scrapyard located near a large body of water. The area is run down and most of the locals are living in poverty. While the setting is a rather sad state of affairs, what you’ll be doing is the opposite. The main goal of Ship Graveyard Simulator is to sell parts to vendors for cash so that you can improve your living conditions. In the scrapyard itself, you can salvage materials, but the main source of revenue will come from the dozens of boats you book for dismantling.

With a hammer, a hacksaw, and a car that runs on unlimited gas, you set off to do your job. The tutorial is all text-based, and the appropriate tutorial will pop up the moment you gain access to new tools or quests. You can always look back at past tutorial prompts when pausing the game. You end up in a loop of collecting parts, putting them in your car trunk for extra space when your inventory fills up, and then going back to the vendor to sell them for money. While you are not required to go to bed, sleeping skips forward in time to 8 AM the next day. This does a few things such as restoring items in the scrapyard, getting a brand new ship in the yard, or paying the daily due for keeping the previous ship around. Usually when it gets dark is the best time to wrap up your activities and start the next day, but if you have a large ship and enough inventory space, you can work all through the night.

The various tools have unique functions from each other. The main one is the hammer and the majority of stuff will be smashed to bits. While every part has different levels of durability, if you hit the white sparking areas, you’ll do significantly more damage. So you can just hammer at one spot until it breaks, but it’s best to hit the weak points for massive damage. The saw will have you cut metal beams and pipes at specific points to collapse them. The best thing to do is to cut the metal closest to the edges to yield the highest amount of scrap. But be careful: If you cut a gas pipe and the pipe is still active, you can risk an explosion. Keep in mind that getting caught in an explosion only hurts you and sends you back to your home.

I like how each tool is used. The extra layers to them make the system quite engaging. It easily could have been a bunch of automated processes and risk running into repetitive actions. You can also upgrade your tools to make the process faster as well as the ability to break higher tier items. The only tool I wasn’t too fond of using is the welder. With how Ship Graveyard Simulator controls, there is a somewhat rough transition going from a PC platform to consoles. The sensitivity either ends up being too stiff or too loose when changing the settings. The welding parts require precision and clarity, which becomes a struggle with a controller. Fortunately, welding isn’t a common activity and in most cases can be ignored.

Other things to do besides dismantling the ships are to do tasks for the locals. Sometimes they will want a specific number of scraps that can be found from breaking down the ships or melded into a new item. While the money you get from them is nice, the main reason to complete tasks is to level up quickly. The more you level up, the more skill points you can allocate to tools, workers, buildings, increasing profit, and so on. The loop of generating profit to improve your area and work on larger ships is surprisingly comfortable.

Ship Graveyard Simulator is a rather casual experience even with the difficulty settings. I mostly played through normal and a small bit through easy and the most notable difference is that the cost requirements for upgrading buildings, and delivering scrap is less. I don’t believe there is a game over state, but messing around too much and poor balancing of your revenue stream can set you back immensely. If this does happen, be prepared for a long climb back to the top.

In the end, I enjoyed Ship Graveyard Simulator more than I thought I would. I’m not the biggest consumer of simulation games in the first place so this was quite a surprise. You can easily get into a mood or rhythm and spend hours at a time breaking down ships and watching your community grow. There are not too many concerns when it comes to morality as violence is kept to a non-lethal minimum and even the alcohol found as scrap can only be sold for profit. While Ship Graveyard Simulator is a good game I can recommend, in the best interest of the average consumer, it might be best to wait for the sequel that will come out in 2023 (at least for Steam). It will most likely cost more, but current previews are shaping up to look like an objective improvement to its predecessor. The console versions of the sequel will most likely come out much later than its Steam release so if you have money and time to spare, it’s a pretty good way to spend it.