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

Looking up information for this game is almost an exercise in frustration and already set bad vibes for me. This title is specifically called “Ships Simulator”, which is completely different from “Ship Simulator”, “Ships 2017/2022” and “Ships Simulator 2024”. They are all different games from completely different developers—and they all show up when put in a search engine.

Starting up Ships Simulator, the presentation isn’t the best with a very basic user interface. That in itself is fine because it is an indie product after all and I can't be too harsh in regards to that context. The goal is to acquire ships, fix them up, and then send them to the port. One of the first things Ships Simulator does is put you through a rather confusing tutorial. The currency to buy stuff is displayed as “$ 500 K” so anyone would assume that means you have around 500,000 dollars as a budget. Despite using the dollar sign and “K” usually means “thousand” in a currency sense, you only have “500 dollars” as the “K” for some reason is used as the currency. I spent longer in the tutorial than I should have because I thought I bought the wrong stuff and didn’t have enough money to even finish the tutorial.

The confusing way of displaying currency is followed by even more confusing control methods. These controls are demonstrated by moving freight from trucks to the boat. With a gamepad, you use the left stick to control the camera, the D-pad to move the crane, and a combination of the right stick and the D-Pad to raise or lower the crane. I had to use the awkward “claw grip" method just so I can accurately move the crane around. What’s even worse is that the controls do not change with the angle of the camera. If you happen to want a better angle to see stuff, the controls stay the same so “up” becomes “left” and so on. You can’t keep the camera in the same place because the giant crane will usually block your vision. On top of all that confusion, the experience is extremely slow. There are toggles to increase the speed such as 4x the normal speed, but even at 4x speed it is still agonizingly sluggish to accomplish anything.

After the freight is taken care of, you get to pilot the boat itself. The boat has gauges that you adjust with the left stick to make it turn or accelerate. While the boat sections control better than the freight, the experience is very slow, and docking requires too much accuracy for the clunky movement. You’ll spend more time adjusting the boat to the dock than actually reaching it. There are a few other tasks to do with other boats such as using crewmen to extinguish fires and stuff, but these mostly boil down to menus.

Video games are bigger than ever these days compared to the ones in the 80s, 90s, and even 2000s, but Ships Simulator is one of the ugliest games I’ve ever seen. In my opinion, graphics (or at least art style) is a priority in simulation games as unappealing visuals can immediately take a player out of the immersion. It honestly looks worse than many early PlayStation 2 games, and the PS2 was a relatively weak console compared to the competition. The rain looks like white lines that just pass through. Most of the colors are dull gray with a complete lack of proper shading and lighting. The draw distance for objects is laughably short and the game still doesn’t run at a stable frame rate.


On the bright side, the music is pretty decent. Or at least it’s the best thing about Ships Simulator. The beat when doing the jobs has a nice groove to it, reminiscent of smooth jazz or blues. It manages to stand out because it’s the only aspect of the experience that doesn’t have immediate glaring problems.

There isn’t much else to say about Ships Simulator because there isn’t a lot to experience in the first place. There are only a few ships to play around with and the overall experience feels more like a bunch of minigames put together that have no synergy with each other. On top of looking dull and playing dull, the only people who will get something out of it are achievement hunters as Ships Simulator has 10 achievements at 100 gamerscore each. So at the very least, it’s an “effortless” 1000 gamerscore that shouldn’t take you long to obtain. Everyone else should stay as far away as possible.