Typically simulation games pride themselves on providing exact recreations of some mechanical process which the every day person wouldn’t normally get to experience. Whether this is driving a formula one racing car, flying a 747 or, in this case piloting any number of different ships, in order to truly earn the right to call yourself a “simulation” game you generally need to meet a high standard of quality as far as realism is concerned. Ship Simulator Extremes does not do this in any fashion.
Gamers don’t expect much in the graphics department from simulation games so it’s hard to say that this game disappoints there, but the one thing that is universally demanded is accurate and precise control. Unfortunately, in this one fundamental aspect of the simulation genre, Ship Simulator Extremes fails utterly.
In the unfortunate event that you’ve been convinced to pick up this amalgam of DLC re-releases (the game was originally released in 2010 but now recently “updated” with a new set of missions and ships), you’ll find that just about everything in this package feels dated. From the outset you’ll be disappointed to note that the “simulation” aspect of the title does not account for the two main factors that affect ships of all shapes and sizes: current and wind.
Don’t be surprised then to see your boat puttering along under full sail while in harbor as you struggle with the controls just trying to make your boat go forward. Though there are many missions included which provide you specific tasks to accomplish, the game does a poor job of structuring your initial options, which will likely result in a frustrating and desperate search for some sort of tutorial.
Eventually you will find what you are looking for (after failing a few of the misleadingly labeled “training missions”) buried at the bottom of one of the mission sub menus. Call me a traditionalist, but when I go to play a game I expect a Tutorial mission to be somewhere near the top of any list, not in a place where you have to scroll down to the bottom of a mission menu which was itself second from the bottom of the start menu offerings.
Once you’ve overcome the hurdle of finding the tutorial mission, you’ll realize that everything you’ve done to attempt to learn to play this game was a complete waste of your time. Ships are controlled by hovering the mouse over floating controls in the middle bottom of the screen, which allow you to control the throttle and rudder direction of any number of vessels. The problem is that you can only theoretically control your vessel, because placing the mouse cursor over the controls does not accurately and reliably produce motions on the screen: sometimes you can lean forward on the throttle, sometimes you can’t, sometimes you can turn your propellers ninety degrees, most times you can’t.
Most real sailors will be familiar with the concept of, “I can’t get there from here,” though typically this is due to wind and water physically restricting particular avenues of approach to a goal. Despite the fact that the wind and tide plays absolutely no role whatsoever in this game, you will still find it unnecessarily complicated in making basic approaches to targets. This problem stems from the aforementioned horrible controls, which prevent you stopping, starting or turning, should the situation demand.
Given those horrible controls, nothing can be more frustrating than getting your tanker up to speed only to find that you can’t change course well enough to not drive right by your anchorage. As if it weren’t bad enough that you had to fight the tedium of “ship simulation” in staring at the screen for fifteen minutes while your ship motors out of the harbor, you’ll only face the same tedium of having to come to a complete stop later in a desperate attempt to turn your ship around to face a new objective.
The game offers one single fleeting glimpse of panache by including objective based campaign missions, which allow you to control vessels that ought to be interesting. But piloting Green Peace’s Rainbow Warrior again turns out to be a horrendous exploration of the game’s broken mechanics as you are first tasked with a sleep inducing full-steam-ahead, only to eventually deploy an ultra fast, nearly uncontrollable dingy.
The purpose of the dingy in the mission is to harass a corporate ship dropping chemicals into the water. The flaw of the dingy is that the water cannons shooting out from the offending ship fill your little boat with water, sinking you and causing you to realize that you just wasted fifteen minutes of your life approaching an objective which took you only five seconds to fail before having to start all over. The silver lining to the cloud is that yelling, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore,” while hitting Alt + F4 really makes you feel like you finally took a stand in your life in saying no to crappy video games.
Although I am almost tempted to say that the experience of rage quitting Ship Simulator Extremes is satisfying enough to be worth the price of admission, the reality of it is that you could probably find that false sense of accomplishment for free by signing some sort of internet petition or writing a blog post about how horribly people are being treated in some foreign country which you read about on the internet. But that would involve a little bit of research, so for the particularly lazy slacktivist I’d like to offer the chance to join our support group down below in the comments section, where we are helping people work through the traumatic experience of having played this game. My name is Patrick Cassin, and I played Ship Simulator Extremes.
Final Score: F+
Compared to:
Watching an episode of Whale Wars: Most people have about as much control over the boats in the tv show as they do the boats in Ship Sim Extremes, but for those with Kinect and a subscription to Netflix, yelling “Xbox Pause” at your tv will yield superior results. The ultimate outcome of both is the same: in Whale Wars, after nothing happens for long enough you’ll lose interest and change the channel, while in Ship Sim Extremes, after nothing happens for long enough you’ll lose interest and change games. The difference is that changing games is bound to be more fun than changing channels, so that means that Ship Sim Extremes comes out on top. Though I’m not sure how that just happened.
Speed Racer: The Beginning: Speed Racer was better. I actually laughed when I played Speed Racer. I didn’t laugh when I played this game. The graphics of Speed Racer were genuinely more impressive than in this title, despite its claim to have “realistic water.” I know you’re saying to yourself, “Speed Racer got an F, while Ship Extremes got an F+. How can Speed Racer be better?” The answer is that Speed Racer is so bad, for one shining moment it is laughable. SSE never quite sinks to that low, which technically means that it even fails at failing. Think of it like the uncanny valley of suckiness.
