Ship Simulator 2008 Collector's Edition

About the most exciting thing you can hope to happen when guiding a 300-foot barge travelling at several knots alongside a jetty at Hamburg, is to be flashed by the liberal local hotties speeding past on their luxury yacht. No such joy when playing Ship Simulator 2008 then, though if it’s seafaring action you wanted you might want to try PT Boats: Knights Of The Sea instead, or any nautical game that will raise your pulse a few beats above the norm. Dutch developer VSTEP’s Ship Simulator series is mostly about pushing your twin engines into full throttle and cruising down canals, harbours and across open seas (at the average breakneck speed of around four knots) while enjoying the scenery. It’s a simulation game so there is a fair degree of technicality to it, but unlike the dizzying array of knobs, dials and levers you’ll find in the cockpit of a virtual Boeing 747, most of Ship Simulator’s boats simply have two levers to accelerate and reverse each engine, plus a steering wheel. All you really have to worry about is the amount of momentum your vessel has, which does take time to gauge.

VSTEP has spiced things up by providing a number of scenarios: enjoy playtime on a speed boat in San Francisco, unload a cargo of fish at a Dutch port or play a ferryman and taxi passengers in Padstow, Cornwall. Each task has a series of objectives that usually include not damaging the ship you captain. Unfortunately, try as we might, we couldn’t sink any of our craft, despite ploughing straight into the harbour wall.

All the same, we were impressed with the accessibility and the variety in the 24 vessels this collector’s edition boasts over its predecessors. We also half-expected to be skippering a Lego lump on a plane of homogeneous blue, but Ship Simulator scales well both ways. A few clipping and anti-aliasing issues aside, it looked attractive and performed admirably maxed-out on a powerful rig. With the mission editor and addition of a multiplayer mode for this collector’s edition, there’s ample gameplay for any simulation fan to get their teeth into.