As recent releases have attested to, the modern PC is still king when it comes to simulations. Titles such as Microsoft's Flight Simulator X (flying) and SimBin's GTR 2 (auto racing) accurately capture the richness of real-world experiences on a computer monitor. From military strategy to sports, there's a PC simulation available for most passions. One notable void, however, is maritime simulation. Boating and sailing enthusiasts have been forced to choose from a small number of less-than-stellar titles. Looking to fill that void is Dutch developer VSTEP, with their Ship Simulator 2008 (published by Lighthouse Interactive), the follow-up to their introductory maritime depiction Ship Simulator 2006.

VSTEP's bread and butter is developing commercial training simulations. A corporation or government entity can contract with VSTEP to develop a 3D training simulation which walks an employee through a potentially hazardous procedure (the Royal Dutch Navy, for instance, uses VSTEP software to train seamen in at-sea firefighting scenarios). With experience combining technical know-how with real-time rendered graphics, VSTEP would seem the perfect developer to tackle an authentic maritime simulation. Despite some obvious flaws and omissions, Ship Simulator 2006 received a fair welcome from maritime enthusiasts. With Ship Simulator 2008, VSTEP has an opportunity to improve their product and corner this wide-open market.

Anchors Away! It's Off to Sea

Ship Simulator 2008 has free-roaming and mission-based elements. 30 missions ship with the title, and are stacked (for the most part) in order of increasing difficultly (although you are free to select any mission from the list). While the first mission acts as a rudimentary tutorial, there's no bona-fide tutorial mode.

Adding to the frustration is the basic 18-page manual which briefly explained the game modes and options and provided a terse walkthrough of the opening mission. A simulation of any kind should ship with a more robust manual. Barring that, there should be an electronic manual (in PDF or HTML format) which delves into the nuances of the software.

Missions consist of pre-defined scenarios; weather choice and ship selection are made for you, and a set of objectives are presented. Successful mission completion entails completing objectives in the correct order, and some missions have time components as well (disaster survivors don't last long in the frigid Atlantic, after all). Objectives may be neatly displayed in the corner of the screen, and the dynamic chart - an MFD-type system, often found in commercial vessels - plots waypoints (and the usual depth and hazard information). Objectives are marked as they're completed, though it's sometimes necessary to switch to a full-screen chart view to find the next waypoint.

You've got all the seas in the world to play in... well, note quite

Missions vary in length and scope. There are a number of rescue missions, which involve plucking people out of the water and towing ships to shore. More advanced missions include operating multiple tugboats and maneuvering large vessels from their berths in tight quarters. None of the missions are particularly difficult. In fact, after getting up to speed with the basic controls, all of the stock missions can be completed in just a few short hours. The lack of skill required and the omission of rewards – new ships and new locations, for instance – upon successful completion make progressing through missions seem like work (especially the utterly standalone ship-loading mission).

Free-roaming allows you to explore environments at will, without objectives. There are 15 environments to choose from, but not all are unique. For instance, "San Fransisco" - in the bay proper - and "San Fransisco Pacific Ocean" (a bit farther out in the bay) are distinct locations. The environments do a decent job of representing their real-world counterparts, with mostly accurate water depths and hazard placement. However, the shoreline is rarely believable (though major landmarks, such as the Statue of Liberty, are present), and the simulation world seems unnecessarily constrained. For instance, a voyage from the docks at Marseilles into the open Mediterranean isn't possible.

It's Sailing... Sort of

Ship controls are simple and intuitive, and can be operated from an overlay or from a first-person view at the helm (a walkabout mode is also present, which allows limited movement on the bridge and deck, depending on the vessel). Basic forward movement is controlled via the throttle (or throttles, depending on the ship), and steering in done via a wheel (larger vessels, such as container ships, have bow and stern thrusters for manoeuvring in port). When using the keyboard, the controls felt lifeless; the throttle, for instance, is an on/off action with the keyboard. More accurate is the mouse control, which has you slide individual throttles and turn the wheel with mouse movements.

The default view is a poorly-implemented chase-cam which almost never follows the ship properly (and is useless in tight quarters). Besides – this is a simulation, so a first-person view at the helm is more appropriate. Being fixed in the captain's chair is fine for smaller boats, but for the large ships, only the walkabout view will do. Here, you can move from place to place, checking the working MFDs, adjusting the engine speed or applying some lateral movement with thrusters. It's also possible to move to around the deck, though this movement is limited (and the sights aren't worth seeing, anyway).

The experience lacks authenticity, though – there are no crewmates or subordinates to order about, and ships' bridges and helms offer only the basic controls. The only visual aid is the electronic chart, dismissing the bevy of monitors that usually grace a large vessel. If you've ever seen the bridge of a modern tanker, you know there's more to operating one of these ships than a wheel and throttle control. And when it comes time to moor and drop anchor, the simulation comes to an abrupt end. Here, simple clicks in the third-person view are all it takes to tie a ship up and drop anchor.

Fire in the engine room!

Audio is very basic, with no support for advanced acceleration. Stock samples give sound to the waves and engine, but harbors are noticeably silent. A working harbor is generally a cacophony of horn blasts, engines and various dock noises, from cranes to workers. The silence, as they say, is deafening. The same goes for the complete omission of radio functionality. Maritime radio is a crucial aspect of a journey at sea, as verbal communication is critical in busy ports. Without radio chatter, almost all immersion is lost. Even the passengers you ferry or rescue refuse to speak. As my grandmother always said, one "Thank You" can go a long way.

These shortcomings – lackluster audio, over-simplified controls – could be forgiven if it weren't for the issues with the ships' handling. Or, rather, the lack of believability in handling. Piloting a ship is a nuanced affair, and a vessel's movement on water is a combination of water forces (waves, currents and tides), wind forces (which affect the vessel directly at the hull and indirectly through the water) and engine forces (via the propeller or propellers, which work with or against the wind and water forces). In Ship Simulator, water is simply a plane that the hull cuts through – with some resistance, of course. There is no accurate physics modeling taking place, either above or below the water line.

Wind has no direct effect on a ship (which it certainly should), but it does correspond to taller waves. Despite this, a patrol boat will roll over the highest of crests in the roughest of seas without deviating from its course. Even the most powerful engines can't overcome the rolling and pitching seas that gale-force winds generate. But the boats in Ship Simulator 2008 are straight from the Ron Popiel mindset (he of the "Set It and Forget It" line of cooking products); just set the ship's course and pay no attention to the 25-knot winds and 5-meter crests.

The problems don't end there. Despite having a full day-to-night cycle, there are no tides. Even when a ship has forward movement but the engines are in neutral, the rudders don't work (as long as there is water passing over them, they should). Ships will rarely capsize (except when they inexplicably sink due to a bug), even when performing outlandish turns at high speed or taking extreme damage below the water line. Collision detection is a rough approximation, likely done with a bounding box, making way for unrealistic ship-to-ship contact. It was possible for a ship which draws many feet to continue into shallower water without running aground. The list goes on and on, but you get the point – the ship physics is appropriate for Grand Theft Auto, not an authentic ship simulation.

The Views Aren't Much Better

Visuals are supplied by a basic (by contemporary standards) graphics engine. As noted, environments are recognizable, but cruising close to shore reveals many poorly textured cut-and-paste buildings and structures. Over a dozen different vessels are modeled, but all are scantly detailed and textured in mostly flat colors (even the logos are low-resolution). From docks to cranes to vegetation on shorelines, only basic modeling was done, starkly reducing the realism.

Water effects are similarly uninspired. Waves are the same repeated parabolic pattern, and unconvincing sprite effects represent splashes and spray. The engine provides for basic water reflections and refractions, but the surface isn't translucent (I tried different GPU vendors' cards and drivers to rule out third-party issues). Compare the water to the detailed and realistic water in Silent Hunter IV and you're left wanting for more.

Simple multitexturing is done to simulate various surface conditions, and the only precipitation – rain – doesn't leave droplets or otherwise obscure vision. A ship's wake strictly a 2D affair of trailed textures, and even lights are represented by intersecting several flat glowing textures (a la torches in the first Unreal). The sun and moon provide only single-color global illumination without any dynamic shading. And the skybox itself isn't convincing, with layered textures simulating cloud cover and starlight. In all, the visuals offer only a rudimentary approximation of the real world.

Twin Outboards or Inboard Diesel?

VSTEP provide only a set of "Minimum" requirements, which are fine for running the software with detail settings at Low. But you're reading a YouGamers review, and surely you're not willing to put up with flat textures at a resolution of 800x600. Since the graphics engine doesn't provide antialiasing or anisotropic filtering internally, you'll almost surely want to force these through your graphics driver. As a bare minimum, you'll want an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ or an Intel Pentium 4 640 processor, if only to avoid a CPU bottleneck. With 1 GB of system memory, a 128 MB NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT or ATI Radeon X800 can push the engine at a steady 30 FPS at a resolution of 1280x1024 (this, with 8xAF and 2xAA enabled and graphics settings on Medium).

For the "as-good-as-it-gets-with-this-engine" experience, moving to a more capable GPU will allow you to up the AA to 4x and the AF to 8x, with all graphics settings maxed out (be sure to move the draw distance and LOD sliders to the far right under the Advanced Settings tab). Either a 256 MB NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT or ATI Radeon X1650 will do the trick, and let you play at resolutions of 1600x1200 (or higher, depending on your tolerance for occasional framerate hiccups). Make sure the CPU is feeding the GPU enough data, though; at least an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 should be sufficient. Even though VSTEP specify 2GB of system memory when running under Windows Vista, I saw no slowdown with 1GB – their suggestion for Windows XP machines.

Back to Dry Dock

Given the lack of reality-based physics, it's no surprise that sailing vessels aren't present. Surely there are sailing enthusiasts waiting for a proper sailing simulation, and VSTEP would be wise to heed the call for wind-powered ships. Equally depressing is the long list of "Features Currently in Development" on the Ship Simulator website. Features such as mid-mission save, ships which sink when damaged and online multiplayer shouldn't be on a "Coming soon!" list – they should ship with the product. And the promised first patch (version 1.1) can't come soon enough; from inaccurate GPS coordinates to disappearing ship models, there are plenty of bugs to quash. QA, anyone?

Those waiting for an accurate and enjoyable maritime simulation will simply have to wait longer. Ship Simulator 2008 has the look and feel of an unfinished and unpolished title. It feels more like corporate training software with a bit of extra content than a fully-fledged simulation. There's just not enough content, and what is present is flawed – sometimes disastrously so. When essential features such as a mission editor and bug fixes are already planned for addition prior to a game's release, it's a clear indication that the software isn't ready for customers' hard drives. Ultimately, there's very little entertainment value in a rushed product, and that statement holds true for Ship Simulator 2008.