izigame.me

I always turn to Simulator games when I want to grind away time. This time I chose Ship Graveyard Simulator 2, just because I thought it might be similar to Shipbreaker, and because it seems interesting.
The fact is kept my attention, that time played is probably just me leaving the game open for 8 of those hours, but I got a solid day and a half of playing, ( about 12-16 hours), and I found it oddly addictive in that same way incremental games are addictive. There's always something new to find until you get to the end and a ton of interesting little pieces to the game makes it enjoyable. However it's not perfect, and we'll get to that too.
The big pieces is it does what it says on the tin, you're ripping ships apart, there's a small puzzle element about how to do that at times, there's a few interesting twists over the course of the game, and there's interesting mechanics at work. You'll use your sledgehammer, saw, and torch mostly as you break apart pieces of large ships and collect clutter.
You'll have to throw everything on to your truck to take it to a recycling center, and you also get a large crane to lift the larger object. The Crane is limited by realistic ideas of where it can fit, so you have to make sure nothing is above the object you want to crane out. Only certain objects can be craned out, and that's the only way they can be removed, but it's a fun mechanic and feels like a major accomplishment when you can crane something on a lower level.
There's also a decent variety of ships, or rather amount of ships. At first you're mostly looking at a command cabin, but over time you get the front half of ships, and by the finale you're ripping apart an entire ship.
After you pieced a ship out, you then can complete contracts based on a certain amount of type of loot or specific objects that you collected, and then sort the rest of what you gathered. Unfortunately this is where we have to bring in some negatives.
The Contracts all feel very similar, and almost all of them is just "Amount of iron". Each one does have a specific item that it needs, but you'll find those way too easy, and they're almost always the same. "Ladders" "Emergency buttons" I wish there was something specific to each ship, or something you have to hunt for. Yes You do have to hunt for the "Ladder" or more of them, but it's the same ladder you saw on the last five ships.
At the same time, the sorting game is just lame. After doing it ten times, I just auto sort every time now. It probably didn't need to be in the game.
Finally you have money from contracts (or selling excess materials) and now can buy upgrades. You pay for a blueprint, and the construct it at a different location. This is pretty standard, but I will mention the price of these gets very expensive by the end of the game, to the point that it feels like it's designed to make the player grind rather than a normal progression system.
Beyond that each ship also has a single collectible that appears in your office, but honestly doesn't change much. It's just one last thing to search for.
And honestly that's Ship Graveyard Simulator 2... And also kind of my problem with it.
The gameplay loop is something you learn very early, and even in the final stages when they throw "winches" at the player, it's not a different system. You're doing the same thing every time, and while that's normal in a simulator, the contracts really could have pushed for more variety. Rather than just demanding "More" of everything, having them need specific parts, or a unique piece (like piping, or the electrical systems) would have really pushed the player to think about it.
In addition once you completed the contracts, you've made a profit. On the final ships, the ships are worth half the price you paid for the ship, but the contracts are where you'll make the "Real money."
But the biggest missed opportunity is that there's no sense of completion when you winch out the major frame work of the ship. There's no counter on the screen where you see how much of the ship is remaining, there's no sense of finishing a ship properly. It's all about if you get the "Contracts" done and find the one collectable, and that's ok, but I feel like there's a further sense of "Doneness" that is missed here. A shame because I really felt awesome pulling the final pieces out, but then the game refused to even acknowledge that.
Ultimately though, this was fun for 12 or so hours, I probably will return to deconstruct a few more to finish off the achievements, and maybe a little grind to get the final tools, but this game is held back because there could have been a bit more. The further metrics would have helped, but even seeing your home base improve instead of being a shanty would have been a nice upgrade.
I will however say not having a story, is expected in these games and preferable.
Oh well, as it is, I still recommend it, I'd give it around a 7 or an 8 out of ten. Rather good for this genre, but there are better choices out there as well (the main one being HardSpace: Shipbreaker). However if you just want to grind on something or like the idea of deconstructing large objects, this definitely will satisfy you for a while.
PS. The physics are mostly unrealistic, but reasonable for the type of game. Watching the entire ship collapse down when you take away enough walls though is always enjoyable.