Sail Simulator 2010 for PC reviewed by Harry Neary. Game supplied for review by Paradox Interactive

I'm a cynical old cove and when presented with a game that has packaging clearly designed to give a false impression I'm very wary. Sail Simulator 2010 aka Sail Simulator 5 tries that old trick of stealing the font from another franchise to ride on its coat-tails. Here the font is from Microsoft's long running Flight Simulator series and the casual observer might be forgiven for thinking this sailing game was from the same stable, harbour, airport or whatever mixed metaphor leaves me without too much egg on my face.

Sail Simulator 2010 isn't very good. At least as a game. For experience sailors with unusual powers of mouse control it might be a great aid to training, but we're a game site and we review games. Sail Simulator 2010 is actually hardly a game.

...

Whereas Microsoft fills Flight Simulator releases with all manner of learning aids, tutorials and the like, SS2010 is a very meagre meal. You're left to choose a boat and get on with it - left to learn how to sail, or try to understand the controls. There is a manual but it really fails to explain why the controls don't often work in the way you'd expect and why you're left swearing at the monitor. The box may say "a full tutorial will help you learn to sail first in single player mode" but it's just a lie. If that tutorial had been included it may have been a different game.

Shark Sandwich
Don't get me wrong - I'm not one of those idiots who criticises Flight Simulator because I can't shoot anything. I love simulators, I'd like to see more on the market. Instead I'm sure I'm another kind of idiot, just not one related to the subject at hand. I was really looking forward to playing Sail Simulator, I've long wanted to learn to sail and have a keen interest in the subject thanks to an obsession with Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin saga.

My first experience with this game was alas like a very hungry man being offered one of my baby son's rice cakes. I suppose it is food of a sort - but not really going to do the job. In single player mode I can choose a location, a boat and some weather and go sail. Fair enough - I expect nothing more, certainly that's how Flight Simulator works.

The problem is that there are very few locations, the boats are all broadly similar and there's no help at all working out what you are supposed to do. The controls really are awfully unresponsive and there's nothing in the manual to tell me why a control works some times, but not at others. There's no difference between the control not responding and me making a mistake with the controls - feedback is minimal. This isn't helped by the control design itself - with icons you are supposed to drag the mouse across. All very well when dragging up the screen, but dragging down across an icon that's at the lowest point of the screen doesn't strike me as great design.

Sinking
There is multiplayer - if you can find someone to play with. And if when you do you've some idea what you are doing. As I said Sailing Simulator 2010 may be a very comprehensive sim aimed at the sailing community - there are certainly tons of options for racing, navigation types, fiddling with sails etc. But on the very basic level it fails fundamentally as a game.

All the above is most welcome in the game. But for heaven's sake give us some tutorials, some concept of understand the fundamental formula of entertainment software that's aimed at the average consumer who may pick this up in a retail games store and actually think it'll feature a tutorial because it says so on the box.

After all we don't expect to see the control software from the Large Hadron Colider ported to the DS and sold as "Dr Brian Cox's Physics Fun". Yet I feel complexity isn't really the major problem with Sail Simulator 2010 - it's the poor controls, but the game is so badly structured many users may just be fooled into thinking "this probably all works fine, it's my fault because I don't know what I'm doing."

There are some gorgeous sea graphics here and really impressive water simulation. I certainly wanted to enjoy the content on offer and get to grips with it, but I couldn't. What a frustrating experience. Hopefully Iceberg will learn from this and return with Sail Simulator 2011 - keeping the excellent sim elements and actually adding a game to it.