PC Critic Reviews

What might initially seem like a real prospective borefest actually turns into a kind of innocent, compelling and surprisingly gratifying experience.

The graphics are visually pleasing, and the gameplay is varied enough to keep you coming back for more.

If you approach Ship Simulator as educational software(albeit flawed)rather than a game, then there's definite value on tap. Those too cool for school, however, will likely want to give it a wide berth. [Dec. 2006, p.128]

As an introduction into the world of shipping and sailing it's not a bad effort, but as an in-depth and richly detailed simulator, it's something better left alone until Ship Simulator 2007 comes along and adds the much needed features that are sorely lacking here.

As simple and effective the control scheme is, other elements in the game are rough around the edges. It’s a little surprising that more ship types aren’t available in the game (less than a dozen). The visuals are nice, but not exactly jaw-dropping.

You will find yourself getting bored with steering the ships around pretty soon as the mission objectives are not that fun. Also the controls are a bit quirky, I have a very hard time trying to use my mouse to use the throttles.

A proper ship simulator. And within that bracket, it faithfully reproduces long, combatless floating sessions. [Sept 2006, p.75]

Not quite as exciting as the title might suggest. [Sept 2006, p.103]

Ship Simulator 2006 doesn't have the feature-set to compete with sims like MSFS and MSTS, but it's a solid start. The developers are already talking about the next instalment and making encouraging noises about wave modelling, long voyages, and multiplayer (not included at present). Unless you've got salt in your blood, I'd recommend sitting on the dock of the bay until SS2007 arrives.

The detail that has gone into the realism of the ships and locations is noticeable, but that doesn’t make up for the lack of any real interesting gameplay.