Cruise Ship Manager Review

Are you up to the task of maintaining and managing your very own cruise ship? Well, if you’ve ever dreamed of selling overpriced tickets to socialites with more money than sense (so, all socialites, basically), then developer Image Power has got you covered… sort of. Cruise Ship Manager allows you to do all of this and more, provided you can stomach the seasickness and tedious gameplay. Oh, and the plethora of bugs. Let’s dive deeper, shall we?

Before setting off on their maiden voyage, players are given a brief tutorial that gives them a rundown of each of the different ways to customise their cruise. Start by picking a destination, then adding rooms and utilities to the ship, hiring some crew, and finally setting the cost of admission. There’s no story or campaign here, just an endless cycle of travelling from one port to the next, unlocking new rooms and upgrades as you go.

Cruise Ship Manager is played via a side-on cross-section view of your ship, where you’re able to easily see all the rooms and jump to any alerts at a moment's notice. The game's graphics are passable at best; the low quality of the ocean, lack of detail in each room type and passengers, as well as the bland screen that shows when you’re docked between cruises all take away from what could have been an otherwise charming title. The user interface is clean and simple to understand, however, meaning it shouldn’t take too long for players to get to grips with how to run their cruiseliner effectively.

As for the sound and music design? It’s almost non-existent. You’ll be treated to a cheesy — yet appropriate — tune within the main menu, but then outside of that, there’s hardly any music. It’s almost eerily quiet when you set sail, with the odd seagull squawking or waves lapping against the hull, but there’s no life or soul to the goings-on of the journey.

As mentioned at the beginning of this review, before setting sail, you’ll be tasked with selecting different options and choices that will alter your cruise. You start by selecting a destination, with each one offering a varying degree of difficulty and monetary reward upon completion. Build mode then lets you place rooms on your ship; areas such as a restaurant and living quarters for your crew are pretty much necessities, but later you can splash out on more luxurious places such as a pool or a gym. What’s odd, though, is how each room is only available to purchase in specific harbours. Once you’ve left that port, any room you didn’t add to the ship becomes locked again until you dock in a place that has it available for purchase. After this, you’ll need to hire some crew (or keep the ones you already have) before finally setting your ticket prices and departing on your journey.

The moment-to-moment gameplay can get quite hectic, with fires breaking out constantly and customers becoming unhappy because they’re sleeping on a rather pungent bed. What truly dampens the enjoyment, however, is that the actions you task the crew with performing can’t be queued. This also goes for assigning job roles; each time I embarked on a new cruise, I had to set all my staff to the same exact roles (such as captain, janitor, and bartender) over and over again. At least my bartender had a go at piloting the ship every once in a while, despite how unqualified she may have been. The pop-up menus when assigning a crew member weren’t helpful, as there’s no way to filter which crew to select — such as removing those already performing a task — leading to scrolling through a list of generic names and faces until you find someone who isn’t pulling their weight.

It can be difficult to prepare for each journey, as you’ll need ample fuel and provision supplies for each trip. How much will each cruise take up? Who knows! I often found myself grossly overestimating how much fuel I needed (which can be purchased at any dock, along with provisions), whilst other times, I was forced to spend a high amount of money mid-journey to ensure I didn’t run out. Fuel can be carried over into subsequent trips, so at least overspending at the port wasn’t a huge issue.

Customisation felt slightly lacking, as outside of choosing where to place each room and changing the wallpaper colour within, there isn’t much else to it. Games such as Cruise Ship Manager thrive off being able to create extravagant (or gaudy) layouts that look different per player. Not so much here, unless you crave a way to change a blue wall into a red one. There’s also no way to customise your crew, which is a shame. Although they will occasionally become bored with their current role (sorry Gary the janitor, you can be the captain now), they have zero personality or means of improving their skills — such as engineering or entertainment — which led to me just dumping many of the crew as soon as someone with a higher skill set came along.

There is very little fun to be had in Cruise Ship Manager for me to be able to recommend it. Sure, the low price point does make it tempting, and the developer is constantly adding patches to fix certain issues, but it’s difficult to get over just how quickly the monotony sets in. A lot more could have been implemented — and maybe it will in the future — but for now, this is one cruise you definitely shouldn’t embark on.