If you liked the base game, you should enjoy Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 – Warships DLC – it’s more of the same, just with a little twist. You continue upgrading your character, use the same tools to pull apart new ships that, while they are warships, that doesn’t really impact the gameplay much. It doesn’t need to though; the straightforward nature of these games are why they scratch the itch they do. You don’t want to have to think hard about what you’re doing, you want to zone out with a fun repetitive task, be it growing crops in Farming Simulator, restoring tanks in Tank Mechanic Simulator, or wrecking ships in Ship Graveyard Simulator. The good thing is the basic gameplay holds strong, and I still enjoy coming back in to wreck some ships.
Warships are awesome, I doubt that’s a controversial take. Be it watching YouTube videos on World War 2, playing World of Warships on PC, or playing with anthropomorphized shipgirls in Azur Lane, warships are just awesome. When playing the base game, I was hoping there would be warships available to break apart but there weren’t initially. When this DLC came around it made me more excited than a virtual job should make someone. There are three warships in the DLC to break apart – the small Chevy, the medium Wicher, and the large Fuso. Despite Fuso only giving us the front half of the battleship to work with, it’s still the largest ship in the game up to that point. The Chevy is a nice quick ship to break, the Wicher gives you something to sink your teeth into and the Fuso is definitely a commitment (to an insane asylum and/or a night of hammering). It shouldn’t matter, but it’s definitely cooler breaking up one of these warships rather than a cargo ship.
The main new mechanic of Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 – Warships DLC is the radioactive hazards. While you could argue it’s unrealistic for a dinky old destroyer to have a radiation hazard on it, it does provide an interesting but not too laborious puzzle mechanic to the game as you’re limited in the area you can work until you deal with the hazard. If all you care about is efficiency, this would just come across as annoying I imagine, but I enjoy the minimal puzzle elements the game presents and this helps break up the basic workflow of pulling the ship apart.
Something not mentioned in the steam store is that there is a lot more crane work. Gun turrets, ship bridges, masts, torpedo tubes and so on all require using the crane to remove them. This usually boils down to the standard grinder, to free them up and then clear them up but there can be a little work to find the optimal way to pull them out without breaking every single component of the ship down. Even on the deck itself there can be an order to which is removed.
Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 – Warships DLC is mostly more of the same – if you liked the base game, you’ll enjoy what’s here, if you didn’t like it then it won’t change your mind unless the warships theme *really* grabs you. There are only 3 ships in the DLC which might not be enough content for some to be worth the price, with one small, medium and large ship – with the largest being larger than any in the base game, or the previous game. The radioactive hazard adds some more problem solving but the main fun from the DLC is the warships – it’s just cool putting these old ladies to rest after their decades of service.
This review utilised keys provided by Gameparic and Ship Graveyard Simulator 2 – Warships DLC is available for $AU10.25 on Steam.
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