Seafarer: The Ship Sim — Beautiful Water, Empty Vessels
I’m a bit of a sucker for simulation games. It allows me to put myself in the professional shoes of those whose jobs I’ll probably never have. I don’t think I’ll ever be a pilot, nor will I ever be a train conductor. I will definitely never be the captain of a large seafaring cargo ship. And while I appreciate games that really lean on the simulation aspect, I don’t mind the option to have some helpful tools that take the ease off the mechanics a bit through player assists and automations. On paper, Seafarer: The Ship Sim is exactly the type of sim I could sink hours into: exploring the wide open ocean, moving freight, and just enjoying the sea spray. Unfortunately, this ship sim is dead in the water.
Seafarer: The Ship Sim (lest you confuse it with another “seafarer” i guess) is a ship simulation game played from a first person perspective. And what better way to have a sim than to have actual sea legs that allow you to walk around these large vessels. I was immediately excited at the possibilities that lay in front of me as I started up a campaign. There’s some strange dialogue, sure, but it’s not the first time I’ve played a game with what seems like AI generated or badly translated dialogue. But what really matters is how the actual simulation is, and that means developer Astragon Development really put some effort into making it the best ship simulation that they could make. Right? Guys?
Sadly, the answer is that they did not.
Ship handling isn’t great. Since the entire game centers around ships and, you know, actually piloting those ships, having poor ship handling is a non-starter. Despite billing itself as a sim, and even touting Nvidia’s Waveworks water simulation technology, the ships in Seafarer don’t handle like large vessels. Though I think the Waterworks 2.0 technology that is employed mostly deals with how the water looks, rather than how ships handle in it. I’ve never crewed a large ship like this before, so I took to the Steam comments and reviews to see if I was off the mark. According to random internet users, my suspicions are confirmed: this game does not approximate the feeling of operating a large maritime vehicle. Which is a major bummer, and instantly makes the rest of the game feel like slop.
Well, at least I can still walk around some massive ships and check them out in their detailed glory. But it turns out, ships are a bit empty and boring. The first person view really helps with the immersion, but despite these big ships having some attention to detail put into their creation, they’re still big mostly empty metal boxes with not much to do in them besides be immersed–which is about as exciting as it sounds.
I mean, there are entire rooms that exist with one or no interactable objects, and instead exist purely for flavor. I’m not opposed to that, but again, it needs to be balanced with fun and capable components to make it worthwhile. I mean, you can add all the flavor to garbage you want, and it still tastes bad. And there are only 8 vessels to explore, which doesn’t make the ship selection feel overly robust.
It’s not like there’s a lack of available activities, though. You can load/unload cargo, as well as bring it to its destination. You can also do non-freight activities like engage in patrols, or even fight fires using on-ship water cannons–which is probably my favorite activity. It gives you immediate feedback, it doesn’t feel as tedious as loading/unloading does–and you get to use a giant water cannon.
There’s also a story campaign that involves uncovering dark secrets while performing many of the tasks in Seafarer across several campaign missions. My attempts to play through the campaign kept getting stalled on objectives that just wouldn’t complete, even after I changed to the 1.0 press review build. While I appreciate the effort, the hokey presentation and strange voice acting combined with the odd dialogue made continuing through the campaign burdensome.
If you ever dreamed of crewing a ship with your friends, Seafarer does help make that a reality with its multiplayer component. Up to four players can play together simultaneously, which helps ease the burden of some of the tedious loading/unloading of cargo–tasks that should go to AI crewmates, but inexplicably don’t. Despite being given a key to test the multiplayer component, my coworkers and friends declined.
I would love more than anything to come in and say that the reviews have it all wrong. That the Steam Early Access reviewers don’t know what they’re talking about. But the “Mixed” average review score for the Early Access product tells a lot of what you need to know about the game itself. My friends were right to pass on crewing this vessel. When the most enjoyable part of a game is spraying a water cannon to break up the monotony of manual labor that the AI refuses to do, the simulation has failed. Seafarer: The Ship Sim might look good on paper, but out on the water, it sinks under the weight of its own unpolished ambition.
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