| REVIEW | Vast Potential, but Someone Dropped the Ball
Being a fan of simulation games, such as Theme Hospital and Age of Empires for instance, I saw this game and had to have it. I like traveling, I like vacationing on cruise ships, I thought the game would be awesome. Boy was I wrong.
Cruise Line Tycoon is a simple game. The player starts with a small ship. The player must design the ship from the ground up, set pricing, and make enough money to purchase the next larger ship. Once captaining the next ship, a captain for the smaller ship must be hired. This cycle occurs until the largest ship is obtained (about 6 ships total I think).
The problem is the game is overly simplistic. All the components of the ships are pre-designed. Nothing can be customized. Changes in the overall ship design can be made based on passenger feedback, but it seems that no matter what is done, the passengers would complain about the same things over and over again. As other reviewer's have complained, the screen seems eternally dark. Despite another reviewer'ssuggestion on how to fix the issue, I was never able to remedy this. Also, the game became even more annoying as it seemed to run as slow as molasses in January when it is run along with even a single other windows application. This was happening despite running the game on a 2.2 GHz PC with 128 MB of RAM (where only 64 MB of RAM and a 500MHz CPU are required)
The game could have definitely benefited from some additions. Disasters and obstacles such as hurricanes, a dockworker's union strike, maybe a case of Legionnaires disease on board, on board crime sprees, corrupt foreign governments, economic downturns, etc. The possibilities could have been endless, and I think it would have made the game awesome. At the very least, I think allowing the player to make their own cruise routes would have made the game tolerable.
I recommend staying away from this game. It is entertaining for only a short while. Save your $20 and go buy something else. |
