Seafarer: The Ship Sim Review: The Genre Revival We Waited a Decade For is Caught in a Storm

It promised to be the glorious return of a dead genre, a true maritime simulator for the modern age. Instead, it launched with the performance of a drunken sailor and the grace of a sinking dinghy. And yet... I can't quite bring myself to abandon ship.

I’m not some hardcore, salty sea dog who’s spent his life waiting for the next great ship simulator. Honestly, the genre wasn’t even on my radar. Then the screenshots for Seafarer: The Ship Sim started hitting my feed. Gorgeous, sun-drenched vistas of open water, meticulously detailed vessels cutting through the waves, all rendered in glorious Unreal Engine 5. It looked... serene. It looked beautiful. It looked like the perfect digital escape.

I fired it up, ready for a chill, relaxing time navigating the North European seas. I imagined charting courses, taking on some light cargo jobs, maybe even fighting a fire or two. For a few fleeting moments, as the main menu loaded over a stunning ocean view, the dream was alive. Then I clicked "New Game," and the dream promptly ran aground on the rocky shores of reality. What followed was a multi-hour wrestling match with a game that is simultaneously one of the most promising and most infuriating sims I have played all year.

A Gorgeous But Demanding Horizon

Let’s get one thing straight: this game is a looker. The artists at astragon have crafted a genuinely nice looking world, nothing we’ve never seen before, but definintely not your average new release either. The way the sunrise glints over tranquil waters or how a storm turns the sea into a chaotic mess is stunning. The lighting and overall mood are top-notch, and the much-touted NVIDIA WaveWorks 2.0 makes the motion of the sea feel impressively lifelike. It’s clear they had a vision, and visually, they mostly nailed it.

But that beauty comes at a staggering cost. The performance is, to put it mildly, all over the fucking place. On my 4080, it's playable, not the 20 FPS slideshow some unfortunate souls are reporting, but it's a long way from smooth. To maintain a decent frame rate, I have to accept that my high-end rig is working harder than it does for games that look twice as good such as cyberpunk. For a game that looks nice but not revolutionary, the resource drain is baffling. It has the distinct smell of a game pushed out the door long before the optimization pass was finished.

The Captain Without a Compass

After wrestling with the graphics settings, I jumped into what the game laughably calls a "tutorial." It’s less of a guide and more of a cryptic series of commands barked from the void. The game explains nothing. It took me a solid thirty minutes of fumbling through wonky radial menus just to figure out how to operate the dock crane. A simple prompt would have sufficed.

This complete lack of onboarding is a critical failure. A good simulator is supposed to be complex, but it's the developer's job to teach you those complexities. Instead, Seafarer just throws you in the deep end with a lead weight tied to your ankle and expects you to figure out how to swim. It's frustrating, alienating, and a massive barrier to entry.

The Soul of a Ship

So why am I still playing? Because beneath the layers of jank and poor performance, the core simulation is solid. When it's working, the feeling of maneuvering a multi-ton vessel is incredible. There's a tangible sense of weight and inertia that feels authentic. As a layman, even I can tell there's a deep appreciation for maritime mechanics here. The little details, like a functional RADAR and ECDIS on the bridge, show a commitment to simulation that I have to respect.

The gameplay loop itself is promising. You choose between different factions, taking on jobs as a cargo hauler, a firefighter, or even sea police. The ability to walk around your ship, from the bridge down to the engine room, adds a fantastic layer of immersion. Checking the engines and interacting with your crew makes you feel like a real captain, not just a floating camera.

The Leaky Hull of Early Access

For every moment of brilliance, there are a dozen frustrating flaws that remind you this game is far from finished. The much-vaunted physics feel bizarrely inconsistent. While the ship handling has a nice weight to it, the water interaction is a joke. The vessel seems to glide on top of the waves rather than cutting through them, and the wake it leaves looks like a cheap, repeating texture. I once nudged a massive cargo ship with my tugboat, and instead of a realistic push, the freighter glitched and slid into its berth like it was on ice.

The on-foot interactions are equally half-baked. Many of the minigames, like loading cargo containers or inspecting other vessels, are just painful. The crane camera is awful, making precise placement a guessing game. It feels less like skilled work and more like a frustrating chore you have to endure to get back to the good part: sailing.

A Sea of Missing Features

The biggest problem right now is the sheer number of basic quality-of-life features that are completely absent. The most glaring omission is an autopilot. In a game with a massive map that requires long voyages, the lack of a simple course-holding function is madness. It turns what should be a relaxing journey into a tedious chore of holding down a key and making constant, minute adjustments.

The immersion is constantly being broken by small, baffling choices. Why does my captain look like he's on his way to a skate park while every NPC is in a crisp uniform? Why does turning off the light on the bridge plunge the entire ship, including the engine room, into total darkness? Why is the currency some fantasy credit instead of just... Euros or Dollars? And where is the ambient VHF chatter to make the seas feel alive? These are the details that separate a good simulator from a great one, and right now, they're all missing.

The Verdict

Seafarer: The Ship Sim is one of the most frustrating games I've played in years, precisely because it's so close to being something special. It is a classic, textbook example of a game that needed another six months in the oven but was shoved out the door to meet a deadline.

Right now, it's a technical mess wrapped in a beautiful but flawed package. The performance is demanding, the tutorials are nonexistent, and it’s missing basic features you’d expect from any simulator. And yet, the core gameplay loop, the detailed ships, and the sheer potential are so compelling that I can't bring myself to hate it. The developers are active on the forums and seem committed to fixing their broken vessel, which gives me a sliver of hope.

Buying this game today is a gamble. You aren't buying a finished product just yet; you are buying a ticket for a very turbulent Early Access journey. If you're a die-hard sim fan with the patience of a saint, weathering this initial storm might be worth the ticket price. There could be a calm, beautiful ocean on the other side of these choppy waters, and I do have to mention that the devs have been incredibly talkative on the steam discussions which Is great to see.

6/10 A vessel with a solid hull, but the engine keeps sputtering.

We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn't impact our review in any way.