Most of the missions require you to go somewhere and do something. Here we’ve visited several checkpoints (as indicated by the green check marks over the icons near the top) and have reached a mooring location where we are required to position the vessel close enough to the mooring bollard to allow mooring lines to secure the boat to the wharf. Pop-up dialogue boxes indicate what you need to do as you approach a waypoint. It is in these close quarters that the challenge of maneuvering the boat comes into play. If you hit other structures or objects you can incur damage which can cause you to fail the mission. The success or failure of a mission is based primarily on the accomplishment of the tasks without exceeding the damage allocation for the mission. Damage is measured in dollar amounts and the amount of damage you do accumulates when you run into objects such as ships, buoys, or other objects. Once the proper parameters for the particular task are met, a dialogue box pops up to let you know you’ve accomplished that portion of the mission. Here we’ve successfully moored our boat among a fleet of sailboats.
Ships range in size from the small water taxi up to a large container ship (a total of 9 playable vessels are included). With ever increasing size comes decreased maneuverability, a larger turning radius, more inertia, and squeezing a large chunk of iron through some relatively small spaces. The large container ship is another one of my favorite ships to pilot because it requires you to think not only of where you are now, but where you are going to be 60 seconds or more from now. The big ships don’t exactly turn on a dime and keeping a sharp watch for obstacles and other traffic will keep you busy.
