Perhaps Ship Simulator’s greatest failing is that, for the layman at least, shipping isn’t really all that eventful. While you are given missions that seem to offer excitement and blistering pace, the care with which these tasks must be undertaken reduces the average player to the level of puzzling out how carefully the ship must be manoeuvred and often doing more harm than good in the process.

It’s not that it’s not fun; there just seems to be a practical assumption on the part of the game that the player will understand instinctively how to pilot individual vessels with some degree of accuracy. The learning curve isn’t impossibly steep, but for the beginner it’s somewhat intimidating.

This puts beginners in something of a quandary. The best missions with regards learning the controls almost certainly the least eventful ones; which means that to get any good at the interesting, fast-paced play, you’ll need to wade (sea pun there) through a morass of, let’s face it, fairly dull content. Even if you do manage to learn to play from the more exciting missions, you’ll end up progressing to fairly humdrum tasks that offer little more than travelling from point to point.

Even the highlights of these missions, actively loading or unloading the containers using cranes, is a novelty that soon wears thin. It’s not an inherently boring game... it’s just that the target audience is certainly those with an active interest in shipping, rather than those with an active interest in gaming.