Preview code used, with many thanks to PlayWay S.A.
Cruise Ship Manager: Prologue – Maiden Voyage is the prologue for an upcoming game called Cruise Ship Manager. This little taste of what the full title will look like gives players a good idea of what will be available in the release, and this little chapter is pretty intriguing.
The Gameplay of Cruise Ship Manager
Much like other management games, Cruise Ship Manager is made of two parts: getting set up and then the trip itself. In the first part, players need to take care of logistics. First, players must choose the destination, buy supplies, hire crew, sell tickets, and prepare the boat for travel.
Players will also need to build rooms inside of the boat to have lodgings for guests, amusements for guests, rooms for crew, stairs between levels, and more. While there is limited space inside the ship to build things, players can upgrade their ships to have more space for customers and crew alike.
The second part of Cruise Ship Manager is the trip itself. Players have to assign crew to all the different jobs, take care of emergencies, fix things that break, put out fires, keep customers amused, and clean up messes that guests make. Players will need to do all this well in order to keep the average happiness of their guests as high as possible, raising their reputation and gaining more money in the process.
The Devil’s in the Details
There is a lot to think about. From the number of tickets to sell, the number of them that should be VIP tickets, how to advertise, what to charge, how much food to bring, how many employees are needed, how fast those employees will run out of steam and have to rest, where to position guest rooms compared to crew rooms to make sure crew can get to problems fast… There’s a lot. Like a lot, a lot. And it looks like the full game will be much bigger than what is here.
It’s complicated but laid out in a way that makes a lot of sense. The UI for Cruise Ship Manager is very well put together and lends itself to learning everything through touch. My first journey wasn’t super successful, but I learned the ins and outs of this game while stumbling through my first try.
There is just so much to learn, and while the tutorial does a great job of introducing all the concepts, it’s just something you have to dig your teeth into to completely understand. How much food you’ll use, how many crew you should have, what are the best positions for rooms in your boat, are all things that have to be learned by doing.
But once you’ve played through once, you’ll start to get a feel for how future Cruise Ship Manager games will go.
Overall, A Fun Management Sim
While this is only the very beginning of Cruise Ship Manager, I got a good feel for what the game will look like in the future. If you enjoy these sorts of management sims, this looks like the full game will be a lot of fun. However, at the moment, Cruise Ship Manager is not finished, and it feels like it. It crashed several times while I was playing and froze a couple of times too. It seemed like I couldn’t get through two vacations in a row without the game coming to a screeching halt.
While I was expecting some bugs with a game that isn’t complete, just like I would with Early Access titles, I was a little disappointed at how unstable Cruise Ship Manager was. Hopefully, all these kinks will be worked out before its release date.
You can find the Steam page for Cruise Ship Manager: Prologue – Maiden Voyage here.
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