First impressions from the trailer, see below, are good with you watching a cargo ship crash into the docks and spill its load followed by watching it be repaired and then sailing out of the docks fully loaded. Graphics in this trailer look impressive, until you realise this is the same trailer as they used for the PC version.
Gameplay
When you start you only have enough money to pick one of the three naval vessels which means you can only have the cargo ship for now, after which and you proceed to the repair screen to ensure that it is seaworthy. As this is a second hand ship there are various damaged parts with you being given the option to regenerate, repair or replace these before then moving onto the mission screen. I found when regenerating the parts they were still needing to be repaired and the repair still cost the same as before regeneration so I am unsure on the regeneration option.
Finally you’re onto the missions. These vary depending on the ship but for the cargo ship, these start off with tutorial missions explaining how to load cargo, move the ship and finally unloading the cargo before you then go onto your first proper mission of moving your ship to another port. This mission is at night in the rain with lightening affects that I will discuss later, this is also rather dark and may require brightness being turned up.
There does not appear to be any open world sailing of these ships with just the missions to run and I could see these start to be very repetitive. The game claims 24 interesting missions so looks like 8 per vessel.
Controls
The controls have the camera on the left stick and the ship/crane controls be the right stick or the D-Pad. This tripped me up a few times during my playthrough, that you can see below, and for the most part cannot be reconfigured, I did start to get used to it but I did have to turn off the inverted camera that is on be default.
Graphics
Now onto the graphics for this game. These seem to be taken straight from the original seven year old game without any graphical improvement, in fact there appears to be a downgrade with ships not even having a wake or spray when cutting through the water.
I would find it hard pressed to say that these are good for the original Xbox One let alone pushing the Series S|X. The night time mission in the storm was particularly bad with everything on the land having a plasticky feel. I noticed that the rain wasn’t hitting the water and the lightening mainly lights up the land with no effect on the water, moving the ship you do notice that some sides may light up with the cargo sometimes getting caught in the flash. At one point I noticed the back of the ship was flashing but the cargo was still dark.
Final Thoughts
If you like the idea of cargo ships and the industry behind them, and only have access to the current or previous generation of Xbox, then this is currently the only game on the platform for you. However if you have access to a PC it may be worth waiting for Ships 2022 when it comes out, I’ve only seen the trailer and Steam page for this but it is shown as having a wider variety of ships and appears this have open world exploration.
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