Review: Seafarer: The Ship Sim

If you asked me a few years ago if there were any ship simulators, the only one that would come to mind is Ship Simulator Extremes, which release all the way back in 2010.

That all changed a few years back, though, when new ship/boat simulators started to hit the market after a long hiatus. The problem with many of these simulators though was that the actual boating aspect came second to the core gameplay, for example, in Fishing: Barents Sea, you’re primarily focused on the fishing aspect.

That’s where Seafarer: The Ship Sim comes in. It’s the new player on the block that promises to be first and foremost a true ship simulator, so how does it fare up?

Graphics and Atmosphere

The first thing to talk about is the graphics and atmosphere of the sim, and this is an area I think the sim excels in. Waves generally look very good, and in general seem to react in a graphical sense of how waves react in the real world.

In terms of the ships, the graphics here are also very good. While some of the doors around the ship are non-functional, others lead to sometimes detailed areas below deck, such as cabins or the engine area. There’s also some functionality in regard to this, but more on that later.

Night lighting on land, which in my opinion is important as it adds to the ambiance of you approaching land after being out at sea, is okay in its current state, but I would really like to see more individual lights rather than just large single light sources, which it seems to currently be.

The general world around shore also feels alive, with the developers modelling in NPCs sitting on beaches and sidewalks, along with AI cars that do actually move around. I’m also very happy with the level of detail put into these areas, as they look great.

One issue that I did run into is that the NPCs have this weird effect when approaching them in first person, where they half disappear but their feet and shadow is still present. This may be intended, but given it still has collisions and a shadow, it’s a little bit of a weird way to implement it and I hope this is something that’s either fixed or reconsidered in the future.

Physics

Now onto the big question, how well does the simulator do as well, a simulator? And this is where it gets a little bit complicated.

Throughout my time playing the sim, I never thought the boats seemed to react in the way you’d expect consistently. In some situations, the boats you’re piloting seem to react to the waves as you’d expect, or to a degree even less than you’d expect, while other times waves just slightly higher would seem to have overexaggerated effects.

For example, in the video below, the boat appears to have the kind of physics you’d expect to see:

However, in the second video below, effects on the boat seem to be excessive.

It should be worth noting that I am not quite sure which one is more correct for the condition in the real world, but the difference between the two videos does seem quite extreme.

The same situation also seems to differ depending on the boat, with some boats seemingly have very little effect on the ship.

Simulation

Now that we’ve talked about both Graphics and Physics, it’s onto the big question. How does Seafarer: The Ship Sim do as a simulator? And well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag, so let’s break it down.

Missions

Missions are the main way of playing the simulator (more on this later), however, I felt like most of these missions lacked depth in their current iterations.

For example, the Firefighting missions tend to always be the same, with a fire breaking out in two spots on a boat which are relatively easily to put out, and have little to no challenge.

Likewise on the police ship side, items such as inspecting paperwork as just a simple click on an item, with nothing else to it. I’d love if the gameplay aspect here could be improved by actually having to look at documents to see if anything is a miss, rather than it just being a simple click where all is good.

Free Roam

One of my bigger disappointed with the simulator is that there is no true free roam or sandbox mode, and you are very much set on the career path, which is something I personally don’t look for in a sim.

When asked on the Steam forums for the sim if this is something that is in the simulator, the developers responded that the quick play option is essentially the free roam mode for the time being, however, this still limits you to the missions, and I would really like a mode where I can simply just drive around and explore, as well as get to know the boats, especially as not all quick play missions allow you to immediately leave the dock as you need to complete a set of tasks.

Not having such a mode made it quite difficult to review each individual boat, which is something I wanted to do in this initial review, though we’ll instead end up posting these as separate articles in the future.

Docking

Another area I was a disappointed in was the lack of docking steps. If you’ve ever watched a video or show of a ship docking, especially bigger ships, you’ll know that’s a lot of work, from lines being thrown to getting lined up, and this is unfortunately something that just doesn’t exist currently.

Instead, you’ll be prompted to dock next to a ship holding a key, which will slide your ship into place and attach all the ropes automatically. While I’d like this to remain as an option, I really hope that we see a more in-depth solution come in the future.

I’d also love to be able to dock anywhere, something that Ships At Sea recently introduced in their latest update.

Boarding Ships

Another area that lacks true simulation depth for me is the boarding of ships, and is something that actually confused me quite a bit during my first gameplay mission where this was needed.

When attempting to board another ship from your own, I would have expected to see a ladder which you’d need to pull up alongside to then climb up, however, this is something that also doesn’t yet exist. Instead, you have to use the space bar roundel menu to teleport onboard the ship. This method was also not actually explained to me when doing the first mission, which lead to quite a bit of confusion on how I was meant to board said ship until I figured it out.

Conclusion

Seafarer: The Ship Sim is the best attempt at a true ship simulator we’ve seen since Ship Simulator Extremes, and excels in some areas such as visuals and atmosphere, though it lacks in both simulation depth and things to do.

However, it’s not all bad. In its current state, I see the simulator as an amazing first step in the world of ship simulators, so I do hope the developers keep on improving the game by adding more missions and bigger ships, such as passenger ferries, and in the long term I would like to see them use the technology they’ve created for this sim in a new sim, on a larger scale, with more sandbox opportunities, just like Microsoft Flight Simulator. Given that, I’m giving the game a solid 7/10 score.