Seafarer: The Ship Sim
Review
Set sail matey
by Howie Howard
reviewed on PC
Seafarer can be played as a career, single missions with selected vessels - of which there are eight - and multiplayer. Online multiplayer allows you to have up to four friends function in various jobs. If you chose the career mode, then you will be required to handle all of the duties that may crop up when on a sea voyage. While at sea emergencies on your ship or on other ships that you may come across in your travels will need to be attended to. Switching to piloting other vessels such as a tug, operating a water cannon, loading and unloading cargo and other activities will all be something that falls under your responsibilities.
Experience that you don't have
You won't have experience doing most, if not all, of the various aspects that controlling a ship in this game requires, but you will learn one way or the other. When first starting out in a career, your first assignment will be to pilot the tug boat of a friend named Teddy. Along with his story, Teddy will give you what seems to be some rather vague instructions on what to do. Unfortunately, there is very little in the way of explaining exactly how to do it. There is a help option but honestly that did not help me a whole lot. You need to carry out the first task of manoeuvring the tug through a debris field on the water. Then it's on to travelling on a cargo ship as a crewman to a port a ways away to deliver cargo. This is where you learn how to steer the ship, use radar, sonar and check engine performance. There's also a map or in sea faring lingo, a chart to see where your ship is.
Ahoy Matey, thar be trouble a brewin' ahead Captain...
Sorry folks about that paragraph title, I guess I have been playing too many pirate sailing games lately and I am stationed on a modern day cargo ship in this one! At any rate, even though the point of this game is to take on all of the various seafaring duties from captain to engineer, to crane operator and others, doing all of that, you might need to ply some rather rough seas just to be able to perform your duties! As an example, in the above tug boat piloting mission, vessels seem to contain a propeller in a pod set up that allows the propeller to be rotated in a 360 degree radius movement. In order to get it correct and head in the desired direction you need to watch a small gauge on the control console and try to figure out what position the pod is in. In conjunction with the thrust or engine speed, this is how you control the ship(s). As a result, when performed properly, which I could not do in the beginning, the ship will be manoeuvered left, right, straight or backwards. It is not the same as driving a car where you turn the steering wheel and you go in that direction. In the beginning since there were no in game instructions on how to do most things all I could do was to get the ship going in circles. I had to check the web to get some hints on how to steer and manoeuver the ship!
We hit a big storm that threw us off course Sir.
I really wanted to love this game from the beginning because of it's sea-going theme, but some aspects were quite frustrating. Just about every aspect of the game except a few simple functions, Needing to jump oonline to get hints on how to do things should not be necessary. Everything is a step by step process that needs to be finished before being able to move on. In one instance, half-way to the destination port in order to deliver cargo, an emergency alarm sounded and I had to go to engineering to fix the ships engines. I get to engineering and there stands what I assumed to be the chief engineer and he has absolutely no idea of what to do and he does nothing except block your way. You would think he would offer some hints, but no. So with the red alarm lights blinking and as an almost near blind guy because of the darkness I had to hunt and click my way in the red flickering lighting. Finally I checked and changed the air filter, checked the oil and refilled it and the emergency was averted and the voyage continued.
The description about the engine emergency and manoeuvering the vessel above that required outside game research to resolve was only the half of it.
Another issue was when I chose to operate a police patrol boat instead of the cargo ship. No need to talk about the patrol boat because duties there were similar to the cargo ship operation. Operating a water cannon however wasn't hard and it was fun. With that said, I would like to go back to the cargo ship briefly. The last requirement to successfully complete the cargo ship mission was to unload five cargo containers and then transfer an amount of LNG, which is Liquid Natural Gas to the pier. The containers were easy but the LNG was not. I needed to hook up and then activate a pump to transfer the LNG to tanks on the pier. I had no idea how to do this because the initial instructions were "hook the hoses up and transfer LNG"! Where are the hoses and the pump? No luck...so I scored the net for some help...Still no luck. In the end, I chose to start over and try a different mission altogether. This has to be the worst tutorial I have even seen in a game, and I have seen many.
An unsuccessful cruise into port
I'm generally quite lenient when it comes to providing review scores. Developers do invest a lot of time and money into their projects. This was not a bad game, it just seemed to not be ready for prime time. Most every time I logged in to play a big update came in. With that said, Seafarer was in Early Access for almost a year and a lot of the information concerning my research for hints matched what I was experiencing in game. What people were making note of concerning occasional game slow downs even though a strong PC was being used matched my experience.
After saying that above. Seafarer is true to the very basic ship sailing concept that very large sea-going vessels simply cannot be stopped on a dime by slamming on the breaks. Ships do not have brakes and they are extremely difficult to manoeuvre. They are essentially slow-moving, hulking pieces of metal that are propelled through sometimes very rough waters. An aircraft carrier or a large cargo ship might take many miles before it stops. That concept is simulated very well in the game. I might add that the visuals are wonderful - water looks lifelike and the insides of the ships look authentic. The main problem was little or no help in the form of hints on how to do things. Perhaps have the chief engineer offer hints or have competent AI handle these tasks. I'm going to keep my eye on this ship though, because it definitely does have promise if the developers choose to get their vessel in to a bit better ship shape.
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7.2
fun score
Pros
Very satisfying sea and ship related visuals. Excellent ship sailing model. Great audio
Cons
Reasonably tough learning curve.
