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Game Review

The Ship – Game Review

The other day while staring at my computer screen wishing that my revision would do itself, a little message popped up on “Steam”, a friend of mine and just sent me a free 3 day pass to play The Ship. Developed by Outerlight using values Source engine, The Ship is a murder party game, where you run around on a cruise ship, hitting people over the head with a frying pan.

At a first glance this game offers a lot, a 1920s assassins game played out on a cruise ship, but it falls short, mostly let down by bad game play and just lacking in ideas.

There are two game modes I could play on, death match and hunt. Death match is you standard event, find a weapon, and just kill anything which moves. Hunt mode is when everyone is assigned a person to kill, you must kill that person in the time limit, and also avoid being killed yourself. Good on paper, but it just leads too players run up to each other, exchanging names and either killing each other or running on to the next person, resulting in a very repetitive game play, Find target, kill them, go rest and wait for round to end while avoiding being killed. There is a single player mode but since I couldn’t play it on the guest pass I would touch it, but reading the wikipedia entry it sounds like hunt but only with more bots *shudder*. Also I remember playing the Ship a year or two ago on a free weekend, where you could play team death match which was quite fun.

possibly what someone did to the designer during programming?

possibly what someone did to the designer during programming?

The ships are well designed and have a wonderful 1920s Art Deco theme to them all, but they lose there charm after the first hour or so. It’s quite easy to get lost or confused as to where you are or what map you are on. Also the re-spawns or messed up. I was playing death match and everyone re-spawned in just 2 adjacent corridors, leading to the fighting being played out in those too corridors while the rest of the ship was empty for whole time, oddly I found the funniest level wasn’t a ship, it was a a jungle resort, where everything was on bamboo rafts, and you could swim in the water to get the edge on someone but stay in there too long and piranhas will start munching on you.

There is an element of the Sim’s in the game. Your character needs to eat, sleep, be entertained and socialise with other people, use the toilet and wash themselves. This can make you character vulnerable when your asleep anyone could come and kill you in your sleep. But sleeping doesn’t take that long to do, so something which could have been a fun mechanism of the game, of sneaking up to someone and stabbing them in their sleep, or stressing for a few second if you will get stab comes up short. The jail is another aspect of the game which I’ll talk about later as its broken.

The weapons can break down into ether melee and ranged. The weapons while varied do get boring, I could for example kill a person with a shovel, but seeing as that has the same effect every other weapon, you get the feeling, what’s the point in searching the entire ship for that one novelty weapon when I could get the same effect as from a sharp pencil? The guns how ever are good, but are rare which is a good thing while playing hunt, but during death match, whoever is lucky enough to find the Tommy gun first, can just go on a rampage and be untouchable. One good exploit of a weapon I found was with the Flare gun, I got shot and set on fire, and just by running up and touching someone you can set them on fire and get the kill. Leading to me killing the guy who shot me and two other bots just standing by facing the wall.

the-ship_3Now one of the game massive faults is the A.I. of the bots in multilayer, the worst A.I. I had experience with before this game was Goldeneye on the N64. Back then you would go into a room, fire one shoot, then run back, hid behind a box, and wait for all the bad guys in the room to run around the corner, one by one in an orderly fashion, while I just held down fire for 2 minutes until everyone was dead.

The Ship surpasses that by having all the computer bots just run up to you, wanting to have chat: easy cannon folder for me and my baseball bat. And even worst is when a group of Bots get together, they will just stand in one big group talking to each other, leaving me to either take them out one by one, or just use a wallet bomb on the whole lot. Another thing, if you can have a wallet bomb as a weapon, give the players some range with it, you can only throw it about 2 feet in front of you, and thats frustrating when there is a room full of people, just waiting to be blown up and I throw the thing at my feet.

There are some other interesting way to dispatch your fellow player, some ship have traps on them, for example you can lock a fellow player in the freeze and turn the temperature down to -155C, or do the same thing but with a sauna. But this is such limited use as no one has any real reason to be in the freeze or sauna in the first place., another way to get rid of someone, is too run thought an area where a guard of security camera Is placed and hope that they forget to put there weapon away, and get sent to jail.

That’s another thing, the jail. Did all cruise ships in the 20s have jail on them? It works well as a game mechanic on paper, but a bit separated from the rest of reality, oh and doesn’t work. If you do go to jail, as far as being a hindrance to your performance it can help. You can sleep, eat, shit/piss and wash, read, talk to inmates all without fear of being killed and its all within the same room. So basically its a pit stop to rest your character before, re entering the game. Also one odd thing was I found a shank nearly every time I when to jail. A fun weapon but you do ask why both having the jail if a player can come out 100% up to speed and with a weapon.

All in all, the Ship really doesn’t do enough, offers a lot but fails to come up with the goods. I think that a guest pass is the perfect thing, you can go on a short break and come back without a great loss, and if its your thing well go for it, It is only £14 on Steam but I don’t think its really worth it, wait till Steam does another free weekend where you can play it, before you spend the cash.

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So is Rhys rocking the Boat? or is this something we should all abandon like rats leaving a sinking shit? feedback and let us know.

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About The Author

Rhys

The 20 something Geology student, who dreams of one day of becoming the most powerful mad scientist in the world.

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Article Information

  • Posted: Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
  • Author: Rhys
  • Filed Under: Games, PC, Review
Tags: , , , ,

Comments

One Response to “The Ship – Game Review”
  1. GalacticPenguin GalacticPenguin says:

    I used to go to an Acting Class in Peterborough, and the teacher there was one of the voice actors for The Ship. If you look on the game’s IMDB page, he’s the only guy in the cast with a mugshot.

    May 26, 2009 at 8:06 pm

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