I am standing on the bridge of the Supertanker ‘Latitude’, peering out into the murk ahead. We are edging our way through the Solent on our way to Fawley and it is an absolutely filthy night. The radar scope is alive with contacts representing other ships all around us, but so long as we stick to our designated course all should be well. Suddenly, out of the gloom on our port side a huge container ship appears on a reciprocal course to us, less than half a mile away. He should pass us easily but I send a lookout outside with a pair of binoculars just to be sure. The distance closes as we inch past each other on our respective courses, but he passes by without further incident and slides back into the murk with a farewell blast on his horn…

Sounds good doesn’t it? And in places it is, but Ship Simulator didn’t quite cut the mustard with me for a number of reasons.

Now, I am a self-confessed geek as regards all things motive. Planes, mainly, but trains, boats, hey - even buses. So I quite fancied the chance to take a break from the virtual skies and see how I would get on guiding a massive ship through the busy Solent, maybe doing a few lifeboat rescues, or just messing around in a speedboat in some pleasant scenery.

Installing the game was a bit of a palaver, with the game refusing to recognise the serial number when I installed both packages together, leading me to have to uninstall both packages, reinstall the main game first, register it, and then install the expansion after that. This was not stated anywhere in the manual, and I was not best pleased at having my time wasted in this way.

Further fiddling then took place as I tried to work out how to enable the multiplayer functionality. For this you have to register the serial number of the game on the manufacturer’s website, but it is far from clear where you go to do this. Again, little or no help from the manual. Teething troubles maybe, but hardly the way to win friends and influence people. Having finally got past the odd installation procedure and the somewhat minimalist manual, the game itself has a lot to offer the armchair captains out there. 23 different vessels, from jetski right up to a massive supertanker. (Actually, squashing jetskis with a tanker sounds like great sport to me, but they’re too damn quick). You can use these vessels in 70 missions covering various scenarios, all of which take place in 8 ‘detailed’ environments across the globe, including our very own Solent and the aforementioned Padstow location. It is also possible to ‘free roam’ in any of those environments, or join in a multiplayer session in one or more of those locations.

Firstly, the controls for all the boats are more or less the same, i.e. a wheel, throttles, a button to start the engines, and a control for side thrusters (Oh behave!) where the vessel has them fitted. This applies whether you are driving a jetski or the Titanic. This does have the advantage of making the game quickly accessible, and all the boats have handling and inertia qualities appropriate to their size, but it tends to make the game seem a bit bland and arcadey after a while. This is not helped by the fact that the interiors of the boats are quite lacking in detail with fuzzy imprecise graphical representations of the various instruments. You can wander around the boats in ‘walkthrough mode’, but the ships are all quite lifeless, although I did find it quite atmospheric walking right up to the bow (the pointy end) of the supertanker in the teeth of a storm and looking back along the miles of deck to the bridge. Also there is absolutely no interaction with the crew. The big ships are ghost ships, with you, the ancient mariner, doomed to sail the seven seas alone. A bit of crew resource management would go a long way to increasing the interest and atmosphere on those long voyages. Silent Hunter springs to mind here.

It also becomes clear as the game goes on that missions mainly consist of sailing from point A to point B, picking up at point B, and going to point C, or even back to point A again. After a while this does get a bit samey. The most enjoyable missions are those where there is a lot of traffic to contend with, navigating the busier ports and waterways, and carrying off a difficult docking manoeuvre for the first time is a nice feeling. But since the controls are all the same, and there is little or no penalty if you hit anything, the tasks quickly become too easy. I did try going online on a few occasions, but there was never anyone else around, so I was unable to evaluate this. Finally the printed manual is brief to say the least, and there is no online or .pdf manual to increase the content. Ok, just about everything you need to know can be found out by scanning the official forum, but it shouldn’t have to be that way. Plus there are still a few people out there without internet access, who will be left high and dry here.

Even with New Horizons Ship Simulator appears to be a work in progress, this being the second version so far, and there is certainly a thriving and active community supporting the game. You can feel the lurv when you scan the message boards. So hopefully some of these issues will be ironed out over time and we will be looking at a more realistic and immersive simulation in the future. Unfortunately for now, the game falls somewhat awkwardly between game and simulation, without being quite good enough at either.