Developed by Games Incubator and published by Ultimate Games S.A., Ship Graveyard Simulator is a ship-breaking simulator and has finally found its way to Xbox. The game was previously available on PC since 2021 and now, Xbox players can jump into the game to experience one of the hardest jobs in the entire world. The game allows you to live your fantasy of a shipbreaker from the comforts of your home. However, with its realistic gameplay, your journey can end pretty abruptly in the game. This is our review of the Xbox release of Ship Graveyard Simulator in which we break some ships and melt the scrap to create unique alloys.
You begin the game by choosing a difficulty setting for your game and once that is done, you arrive at a small village located near one of the biggest ship graveyards in the world. You are a shipbreaker, and you earn money by dismantling ships and selling off anything useful that you find while doing so. You have your very own house in the village which is equipped with a computer for ordering new ships for dismantling and it also houses your truck which you use for hauling around all of the scraps that you dismantle from the ships. After a brief tutorial, the game lets you lose in the world, and then you are free to do whatever you want. There is a gameplay cycle that runs to the very end of the game. Since it is a simulator, there is technically no end to the game but eventually, you will complete everything that the game has to offer and then you get bored with it.
A typical day in Ship Graveyard Simulator begins after the ship that you ordered for dismantling arrives at the harbor. You place these orders using the computer present in your house and each ship gives you a 24-hour window for the amount that you rented it for. If the dismantling takes longer than 24 hours, you will need to pay the rent amount for the next day as well. Smaller ships can be dismantled in one day but for bigger ships, you will need additional days. This is only possible if you have enough money in your bank account to afford their costs for your desired window. The village has plenty of people living in it and if you can afford it, you can hire some locals to help you out in various tasks on the ship as well, but you have to pay them hourly for their labor. It does sound convenient but it’s not cheap.
Upon reaching the ship, you start using your tools for dismantling various things located on its various decks. The bigger the ship, the more decks it has, and while it may take more time, bigger ships do offer a lot of scraps to collect and some of the rarer materials are only found on bigger ships as well. For earning big bucks, you have to spend big bucks as well and this works for the entirety of the game. These bigger ships cost more to rent and since they are huge, the cost of keeping them in the dock is higher as well. For dismantling these ships, you will need a solid collection of tools as well and without these tools, you are nothing in the game. You start in the game with a bare hammer and from there, as you complete tasks and earn more money, you start collecting additional tools as well. Each dismantling item has a tool requirement and even if you own a tool, some of the materials will require a higher-level tool before you can dismantle them. All of the requirements are shown on the item when you are trying to dismantle it.
The tool selection is pretty decent in the game, and you have some of the most powerful tools at your disposal. You start off with a hammer, but you can purchase better tools such as mops, hacksaws, and blowtorches. You can even purchase small dynamite sticks which are used for blowing open doors and other debris which cannot be removed otherwise. Each of the tools you acquire in the game comes in various qualities and for taking down the best quality of scrap, you will need the highest tier of the required tools as well. Apart from weapon tiers, every time you level up in the game, you will earn points that can be invested in each tool’s skill tree for making that particular tool better. Each tool in the game comes with its own unique skill tree and you can upgrade them to make them more effective in the game. Apart from the tools, these skill trees also unlock more storage for your backpack and the truck. They also allow you to increase your own skills as well such as increasing your sprinting speed and such. The whole UI and control scheme of the game has been tailored for its console release. The controls are fairly simple and pretty easy to understand in the game as well.
While you are out dismantling ships, you have to worry about the available storage as well since you can only pick up a limited amount of scrap with you. For this, you can either purchase additional storage slots from your tools’ skill trees or place the items in your truck’s bed. You can drive your truck around the game for speedy movement and it also comes with a huge bed with allows you to store additional scrap there while you are on the job. It saves you the trouble of going back and forth to the marketplace or your warehouse. As you progress in the game, you will create your very own workshop as well which not only allows you to melt scrap and combine it for new alloys, but also comes with a big warehouse where you can store your collected scrap. For making money, you can sell scrap to the marketplace or complete different orders that random villagers will have for you. Simply deliver their required materials and you will earn XP and money for completing their orders.
As you level up in the game, you will unlock access to bigger and better ships. While you are trying to hire a ship, you will get to know what sort of materials you can get from the ship and how much it will cost you to keep it harbored at the dock for each day. Once your ship has arrived and you are done with it, you can dismiss the ship and hire another ship. Once a ship arrives at your dock, it will remain there for 24 hours at all costs since you have paid its price for this duration even if you are done with everything you want. New ships will arrive once the old one has gone, and you can speed up time by sleeping in your house. If you manage to complete all salvage work before the 24-hour window is over, you can hire the next ship, and then you can sleep to start with the new ship when you wake up. If you are unable to afford a new ship, you can re-hire ships you hired before to grind them for money or level.
While the game does not allow you to dismantle a ship completely, it is still quite good. At the end of the day, the main structure of the ship pretty much remains the same and there is no dismantling to the factor that the ship cannot move anymore. This is kind of a bummer because having that much amount of dismantling in the game would have really made it a perfect ten because, at this moment, you are simply dismantling whatever is present on the deck of the ships or installed in its various walls. The ship itself remains pretty much intact overall and that is a big disappointment. Still, the amount of detail in the game is pretty decent and the overall content in the game is pretty decent. There is a sense of progression in the game as well as you level up to unlock bigger ships and have to really grind your way to better tools. The visuals are not award-winning, but they do the job just fine and I am happy to say that there are very few technical glitches or bugs in the game as well.
Final Verdict:
Ship Graveyard Simulator is a great ship-breaker simulator, and it offers tons of fun for players who want to experience one of the most difficult jobs in the world. While the game may not be as detailed as I would have liked it to be, it is still pretty well-made and offers quite a bit of enjoyment for players of every age. The number of tools at your disposal is pretty satisfying and there is actually a sense of progression that few such simulators ever have. Breaking down and dismantling ships is extremely satisfying in Ship Graveyard Simulator however the only thing I can think here which should have been part of the game is that we should have been able to completely dismantle a ship rather than a few things on top of it. It would have made the game a real ship-breaker simulator. Still, it offers hours of dismantling fun and if you love playing games where you only have to break stuff and collect raw materials, Ship Graveyard Simulator is a decent title in this genre.
Final Score: 8.0/10
