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GKick Review: Ship Simulator Extremes Collection
June 27th, 2012 by Brad Ward
FACT SHEET
Ship Simulator Extremes Collection | Available Now
PC | Publisher: Paradox Interactive | Developer: VSTEP
After reading quite a bit about this game, I felt fairly excited for it but wasn’t sure really what to expect. I grabbed my steam code for the game, downloaded it and opened the game up to play the next day. I fired open the game and worked my way through the millions of options for setting up the game. After finishing up all the game options, my journey through the wide open seas began. Little did I know I would be in for the most torturous and frustrating journey I had ever been on.
There is so much to say about this game, I really don’t know where to start. I won’t go into it, but just to launch the game, the amount of time the loading screen took was terrible. In the amount of time it took to load I could have driven to Moscow, Russia and back. ( Yes, you did read that right, driven. ) Okay, not that long, but pretty close.
Choosing a ship was the best and worse part of the game. I loved the idea of being able to choose between 40 different vessels all at my disposal. There were a few things that just ruined the experience though. The fact that I had to click on each boat, click preview and then wait 30 seconds for the preview of the ship to load was ridiculously painful to wait through. Oh and those 40 ships you get to choose from? There are a few unique ones, but most of them are all reskins.
Finally, its time to play! I begin to control my boat and head to the objective. Little did I know it’d take 30 minutes to an hour to get to said objective. I finally get there. My objective is to stop these dudes in orange suits throw waste out of their boat. How do you do that? Well according to the game, you take your ship and put it up right next to the ship that’s throwing the waste out and wait 30 seconds just sitting there doing nothing while the 30 seconds timer runs out. During that 30 seconds, apparently the ship that was throwing the waste out hit the end of the borders of the game and was met with a invisible wall. It then was stuck and began jerking back and forth.
After finally completing my objective I went back on my way to the docks as it had told me to do. Half way there my boat randomly flips over and after about five or ten minutes messing around with the keys trying to get it back on track nothing works. Nor was there any win or loss conditions for it flipping over which resulted me in having to start over the 2 hour long mission.
The game really needed some work before it even released, I would have thought it would have been better with the DLC including some fixes, even. If you can bypass this games cardboard like graphics I think this game would appeal to people who enjoy simulating ships in real-time. Though, getting past the bugs will be fairly difficult. I tried very hard to be open minded about this game, but in all honesty, Microsoft’s Flight Simulators are better than this. After they fixed some of these bugs and even improve the gameplay a bit, I wouldn’t mind giving it a second try.