Ship Graveyard Simulator Review | PlayStation 4
Shaun M Jooste 
Exciting Ship Graveyard Simulator Review PlayStation 4
Welcome to our Ship Graveyard Simulator Review for PS4 where we check out the story, gameplay, visuals, sounds, trophies, and much more!
Operating System: PlayStation 4
Application Category: Game
4
Welcome to our Ship Graveyard Simulator review!
Ship Graveyard Simulator is a destruction and building simulation game with a focus on abandoned ships. Games Incubator is the developer, with Ultimate Games listed as the publisher. While it was available on PC and Xbox before, it finally launched for PlayStation consoles PS4 and PS5 on 23 February 2023.
If you haven’t played the sim game yet, you’re in for an impressive surprise. There are so many fun elements that will have you grinding away for days. After we received a free review copy, we spent several evenings dismantling ships and enjoying doing so.
Read about our experiences and how to play the game in our Ship Graveyard Simulator review below!
Ship Graveyard Simulator Review: The Story
We like consistency. Therefore, we’ll begin our Ship Graveyard Simulator review with the story elements. While there isn’t an overall plot, you will find linear progression in the sim game. Here are the details regarding what it’s about and how long it will take to complete.
A beach full of ships
The start of Ship Graveyard Simulator presents you with a beach filled with wrecks. The first impression is that you’ll have to spend time clearing the sand, but sadly, this isn’t possible. Those wrecks will remain there throughout the game, and for a good reason.
For now, you’ll focus on ordering ships to them apart from the computer in your small shack. You’ll start with small ones until you reach levels that unlock larger fleet. On the PlayStation version, you can only work on one ship at a time.
Building management
Besides taking ships apart in Ship Graveyard Simulator, you’ll also need to build and upgrade buildings. Each one has a specific function. The furnace and workshop let you combine metals and other resources to make new materials. With the tool shop, you can buy better equipment to tear ships apart. You’ll also have a Barrack, which is where your hired workers live.
Providing jobs
Now we get to the part of the wrecks for our Ship Graveyard Simulator review. While they won’t become any less, there are components that randomly generate daily around them. Don’t waste too much time running around collecting them, as that’s what the hired workers are for.
When you visit the wrecks and small shacks on the beach, you’ll see guys with yellow helmets on. The game’s a bit sexist in this regard, only employing men to do the collecting. That aside, they have Tiers 1 to 3, where the higher levels collect more valuable resources every day. They place them in a crate alongside the building for you.
Fulfilling Orders
One final aspect we want to cover for our Ship Graveyard Simulator is the order fulfillment aspect. There are a few guys on the beach that will dish out orders for specific materials and resources. Some of them you can simply collect and deliver, while others you need to make in the workshop. The more challenging the mission, the more money you will make for the order.
This quest system helps you make money quickly in the beginning. Once you hit max levels and you’re raking in the money by deconstructing ships, it’s not necessary to continue with orders. There’s also no achievement for continuously doing them for too long, especially after upgrading everything.
How long to beat Ship Graveyard Simulator?
That’s about the gist of the Ship Graveyard Simulator. You order a ship, deconstruct it while collecting resources, fulfill orders, and then sell the remaining parts to increase your bank account’s funds. If you simply play to max out the levels, you’ll be done by the time you work on your 5th ship completely in about 15 to 25 hours.
However, it will go on for much longer if you want every single achievement, which consists of deconstructing every ship at least up to 70%, except for a few at 90%. There are a total of 40 character levels that unlock larger ships. After that, you’ll spend most of your time upgrading workers, buildings, and tools to the max.
Ship Graveyard Simulator Review: Gameplay Elements
On to the next part of our Ship Graveyard Simulator review: how to actually play the game. The gameplay elements aren’t that challenging to master, but there are a few things you need to keep an eye on.
Learning how to play Ship Graveyard Simulator
You won’t be left wondering what to do when you start playing Ship Graveyard Simulator. There are plenty of helpful tips throughout the game, especially when you encounter something for the first time. A window appears with clear details on the steps you need to follow.
Starting your first ship
Once you place an order on your computer, the ship will arrive the next morning at 8:00 am. You need to keep in mind that there’s a rental fee for each day that it remains on your beach. It’s best to ensure that you have those funds available in your account before the next 8:00 am arrives.
The ships are available in small, medium, and large sizes. It’s essential to pay attention to daily fees, what materials you’ll find in various quantities, and how long it could possible take to complete them. At the beginner level, you’ll only have one ship available to salvage. More unlock as you progress through character levels.
Collecting resources
The main point of Ship Graveyard Simulator is to deconstruct parts of the ships that arrive. You’ll climb onto the deck and investigate various exterior and interior levels. With the right tools at hand, literally, you’ll either bash with a hammer, scorch metal hooks with a burner, picklock crates, explode massive doors, or grind pipes and bars.
The best part of the ship simulation game is that the resources fall into neat components that are easy to collect. Each type of material has a specific shape and colour, making them easy to identify. Also, you have highlights for various tiers, almost like the epic, rare, and legendary systems in Diablo 3 and Fortnite.
Inventory management
You’ll start with a small bag, but you’ll upgrade with more space as you level up and unlock skills. Even your vehicle has limited space at first, as well as your workshop and Barrack crates. You’ll need to learn how to manage the storage in each one until you can unlock more at a later stage.
For our Ship Graveyard Simulator review, I felt that your personal shack could have done with some storage crates. There clearly are boxes outside your home and lockers in the house. It would have been great if you could have saved specific resources here for orders or later upgrades.
The Marketplace
You’ll need to sell items when your inventory or storage spaces become too full. There’s a marketplace near the tool building in the form of a solitary gentleman. When you chat to him, you can quickly sell items by pressing square and transferring the ones you want over. Then you hold X to sell. If you want to transfer all items in your inventory, just hold square on any item and release after 2 seconds.
It’s worth stating in our Ship Graveyard Simulator review that you can level up the marketplace with skill points. The types of abilities include increasing resource selling prices and lowering the daily cost of ships.
Upgrading buildings, tools, and workers
While playing the game for our Ship Graveyard Simulator review, I noticed that the first half is spent upgrading buildings, tools, and workers. All of them require money, while the buildings need specific materials. You’ll invest most of this time searching for specific resources and not selling them.
When you’re done upgrading all of them, there’s little else to do but level up and sell the resources. You don’t need to store them anymore, as they won’t serve any purpose. At this stage, you’ll only deconstruct ships to gain the rest of the PlayStation trophies and become rich to afford the larger ships.
The sad part is that you can’t upgrade your own home shack. Realistically, this makes sense. Who would spend a fortune upgrading a temporary shack on the beach? Still, a wonderful mechanic would have been to build a larger home with maybe a second level and use the resources to make furniture.
However, that’s not the point of the game.
How to break a ship in Ship Graveyard Simulator
Here’s one PlayStation trophy that I had no idea how to complete until I ordered a large ship. The achievement is called “Shipbreaker” and requires you to break a ship in Ship Graveyard Simulator. Once the massive ship is on the beach, you’ll see a huge rope attached to the side of the beach. With at least three workers in your employment, you can activate the mechanism to pull one side of the ship apart, gaining the trophy.
Easy achievements
Fortunately, the PlayStation trophies are easy to achieve. Most of them you’ll get simply by playing the game, leveling up, and upgrading buildings to the max. The rest are for reaching specific percentages for each ship. For our Ship Graveyard Simulator review, it meant grinding away for days to achieve them all.
Ship Graveyard Simulator Review: Graphics and Sound
You’re almost at the end of our Ship Graveyard Simulator review. This last section deals with the visual and audio qualities of the game.
Impressive visuals
Most of the graphics are quite impressive. There are many items that you’ll find lots of on the ships, but that’s just the nature of these massive ocean vehicles. The zipline you unlock later gives you exquisite visuals of the ocean, even if nothing seems to be swimming in them. Also, looking up at the stars at night is stellar, but I haven’t spotted the moon as yet. Maybe I was too busy working when it appeared or went to sleep too early.
Easy interaction with items
Most of the items you’ll find in Ship Graveyard Simulator are easy to interact with. You’ll need the right tool to break a component down to the materials, but you won’t have too much of a struggle. The graphic icons show you what parts they contain, and you’ll also see how long before they break. Some also have small highlights to show you where to burn or hit.
Casual music with limited sounds
You’ll have basic music playing in the background. It’s mellow, but don’t expect too much of a playlist. Also, the NPCs don’t have voices, and you’ll just see text on the screen. It’s more of a visual experience than any impressive audio. However, there is a certain satisfaction when working with the tools and hearing the impact on the components and metal.
Ship Graveyard Simulator Review: Final Verdict
That’s our Ship Graveyard Simulator review! Overall, it’s an addictive game where you and your friends and family can take turns with the control demolishing ships. You’ll grind away for several days to get all the trophies, but it’s a rewarding experience. There are a few features that can be improved or expanded on, such as the house shack. Yet, it’s absolutely worth buying and playing for days on end, and I don’t want it to end.
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