Ship Simulator is a franchise that’s been around for several years now, produced by VSTEP and published by Paradox Interactive. The latest entry to the series, Ship Simulator: Extremes, comes with a bit of new content, and a lot of old.
For anyone who has ever played any of the previous Ship Simulator titles, this game will be quite familiar. What’s new, though—and one of the biggest changes to the franchise—is the weather system. Previously, you were locked to a laughable four-meter waves. Now, however, you can feel how it really is to pilot a supertanker in a hurricane, as there is close to no limit on the extremes of the weather. You now also have the option to launch smaller craft from your ship in order to perform tasks such as carrying goods ashore on a rocky island in the Antarctic, or inspecting fishing vessels for the Coast Guard. You also have a new working radar, and you can put out fires with the water cannon. There are a lot of new unseen vessels, including two from Greenpeace, and new areas to explore.
The weather can get very, very rough
The controls are familiar. The only new feature in this sense is the drift computer, which will show in what direction your vessel is travelling and at what speed at any time. Controlling the vessel using a mouse is, as previously, annoying. In order to adjust the throttle, you have to hit a tiny point on the throttle stick, and when you manage to hit that point, you will have a hard time adjusting to the correct speed since most movements with the mouse will cause the throttle stick to move back and forth erratically. This almost forces you to use the keyboard for throttling and steering, which is smooth and accurate, but not as enjoyable.
You can launch small craft from your ship
The game does have its annoying moments, and even a few bugs and glitches. When launching a small boat in bad weather, and taking it for a ride, waves will more often than not go through your boat. This is realistic enough, sure, but when it results in my screen showing nothing other than pixelated lines in helm-view, making the experience all but enjoyable, I get slightly annoyed. I have also experienced AI vessels spawning meters from my own ship, at full speed, ramming me and causing me to sink. This leads me to another annoying aspect of the game; the damage system. Even bumping lighly into any object will cause you to sink in a matter of seconds, when in real life it would have left mere scratches on your hull. This problem is acknowledged by VSTEP and according to Shipsim.com official forum, a patch is on the way to correct this issue. The weather is cool to play around with, but it doesn’t feel as extreme as one would expect. In freeroam I took a tiny taxi-boat for a spin in a hurricane, and expected to have a real hard time keeping afloat. To my dissappointment, the taxi just chugged along at full speed, hardly affected by the waves several times higher than the boat itself.
The Coast Guard to the rescue
With the new features SS:E offers an even more immersive and detailed experience then the previous titles, but little more than that. It doesn’t feel completely new or revolutionary—more like an add-on or a mod. The new weather effects looks nice, sure, but they don’t really feel that extreme. The bugs and annoying moments also need to be addressed in order to make this game fully enjoyable. If you are a hardcore ship-sim gamer or really interested in boats and sailing, you might enjoy this game. If not, you should probably steer clear.
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