Ship Graveyard Simulator Review – PlayStation 4

I don’t review games for a living – it’s a hobby I picked up when my wife was pregnant with our first child.  She spent 80% of those nine and a half months sleeping, so I had little to bide my time. I had always been a gamer (Commodore and PC), so I picked up a PlayStation and some games, and somehow it morphed into me reviewing said games.

But in my real life, I am a degreed metallurgist that has worked for 28 years in metals processing and manufacturing. So, when Game Chronicles offered me the opportunity to review Ship Graveyard Simulator – a game centered around the demolition, sale, and processing of metals and other raw materials from scrapped ships – I was all-in.

Ship Graveyard Simulator puts gamers in the dungarees of a shipyard scrapper in an unnamed coastal shantytown littered with carcasses of scrapped vessels. The game takes players through a rather long and plodding tutorial gathering and selling scattered materials left behind by other scrappers, eventually affording the gamer to buy his first scrap vessel which leads to building a tool shed/foundry to process the materials into more desirable alloys and materials.

Once the gamer is released into the wild, they can choose to build barracks which allow the hiring of crew members, leading to more scrap money, better tools, and more impressive vessels.  It sounds boring – and at times it is – but it is also surprisingly soothing and addictive, especially once the incessant hammering takes a sidestep to more powerful tools like blowtorches and explosives become available and the money from the more precious metals they acquire really starts rolling in.

The shantytown is modestly populated with NPCs, some of whom will interact with the character – generally asking for work, or to buy/sell items.  Every 24-hour cycle (game time) players can purchase a new vessel to scrap, transporting the materials to town to sell or process. There isn’t much challenge, there is no danger, and there is little action – it’s all really chill and frankly, quite relaxing.

The foundry aspect was really the most interesting as a metallurgist, as the game provides specific recipes for alloys higher order alloys and fuels, complete with specific processing temperatures and times. It might not be a detailed as we do in the foundry, but it is a fairly good representation of how things work.

Ship Graveyard Simulator is certainly not going to appeal to every gamer, but if you have an interest in metallurgy or scrapping, it is a very relaxing way to experience a world many don’t know even exists.

Author: Arend Hart
Veteran gamer and review writer, Arend has been playing and reviewing games for Game Chronicles since the beginning with more than 400 reviews over the past 20 years, mostly focusing on PlayStation.

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