TransOcean 2: Rivals is a new Shipping Company simulator by Deck13 Hamburg, a sequel to their first TransOcean game back in 2014 that was met with mixed reviews. Trying to improve on their previous game, TransOcean 2 boasts better graphics and gameplay, bringing it into 2 years of innovation and power. With all the simulator games around is TransOcean 2 good enough to keep itself afloat?
Story
You play as the Boss of a major Shipping Company, who sadly went under and went to live in Alaska after the suing and bankruptcy. After some time you are picked up yet again by a Consultant by the name of Heather Witherspoon to gather the Bail needed for her brother. Going through several chapters you will eventually get the bail together and replace Heather with your old consultant Hiram and move on to take better control of Europe and usurp your rival Blythe-Smith.
There are 6 chapters currently in the campaign, taking difficulty jumps at each stage as well as serving as the games Tutorials. Teaching you the tricks of the trade as well as the new mechanics that hold the game together. As the chapters progress you will find each one gain in length and difficulty, the first chapter only taking about 20 minutes, the 3rd jumping up to an hour and so forth. The entire campaign will last around 5-6 hours depending on if you win without any troubles.
Gameplay
Similar to games like Plague Inc. you have a world map with plenty of little objects moving across it, regions of the map split up into 5 docks. You select a dock, either to buy a new ship or subsidiary or to find your own ship docked there. On the bottom left of your screen you will find all the information needed, from a list of contracts you ships can take, the income and current place of your company and victory conditions.
The main aim of the game is to have the most money, subsidiaries and ships. Money is the easiest to come by, simply pick up jobs from the docks and send your ships off to transport the goods. Subsidiaries are businesses within the docks, from fuelling stations to wharfs that sell new boats, these give you income every week on top of a split of profits from other players using their services. Ships are the most expensive, most cheap one’s going for 11million up to almost 200million.
As you pick up contracts you will see a contract pay, that can go down if you take too long, the Region Points you will get for that part of the map which can be used to buy subsidiaries, the time left on the contract against how long your ship will take. From here you can also buy fuel for your ship or repair it if it’s within a Repair dock, adjust your speed to save on fuelling costs or speed up the ETA. This menu of contracts is what you will be staring at for the longest time, checking how to make the most money or Region Points in the least amount of time.
There is the ability to micromanage a lot in this game, from checking how long a trip will take against how much money it will bring in against over jobs. Each ship has its own carry capacity, top speed, fuel and more that you can optimise for certain trade routes. On top of all the little information the Contracts menu presents you with, if you’re a fan of numbers and maximising everything you can then this game will cater to that.
From the chapters that have pre-designed goals like reach a certain amount of money, have more ships etc you also have Competition mode where you set up the AI and the challenge to beat, or an Endless mode where you continually play and learn the game. Multiplayer is similar to Civilization, invite some friends and compete to see who is the best Shipping Company Master.
Overall thoughts and Feelings
The music in TransOcean 2 is very fitting, feeling almost Sim like in its designed and instruments used, but also suiting that entrepreneurial shipping company style. However it is increasingly boring to listen to, it’s sombre for most of your game time and becomes a background piece more than anything as the sounds of docks and your companions shouting over the music. Your frustration from the game doesn’t help matters when the music is so boring to hear or distracting when you realise it’s there.
The game is horribly optimized, my computer can handle most things thrown at it but even setting the game to low it has horrendous lag issues. Speeding time up to 3x will create so much lag and slowdown you will be better off with going normal speed. Besides that the loading times are way too long, from loading the map to clicking on ports (Which is one of the main parts of the game), you will end up spending 1/5 of your time waiting for it to load. Alongside the lag you will also see ships going inside of objects and disappearing as they try to dock.
TransOcean 2 has a major problem with its difficulty, it spikes way too quickly and the 2nd chapter might cause you to retry 2 or 3 times, when it takes half an hour to do this can be quite the annoyance and it only gets worse from there. The mechanics the game teaches you in no way helps you “Win” the chapter, most of the time you will have to ignore what they say for your own better knowledge. Tankers are the money maker, but for money making they don’t really emphasise it and for the chapters where you need Region Points the Bulk ships are king but they don’t reiterate that to you.
The game as it stands feels as if it’s underdeveloped, the ships all feel too weak against each other, forcing you to buy tons of Tankers to stay afloat whilst also needing to buy Bulk ships or you will lose all the subsidiaries to the enemies. You cannot be a jack of all trades as one will leave you in the back of the line in one aspect.
The game has had some earlier problems, but due to Player feedback a lot of those issues have been corrected, the Pause button being a fixed/added mechanic. Hopefully the updates and patches continue to improve the game futher.
Overall TransOcean 2: Rivals gets a 4/10, it isn’t really all that fun to play with the difficulty spiking way too quickly and no real excitement to gain from seeing the ships move about. The lack of a stable fast-forward really drags the game on, waiting for the ships to dock or to stop lagging. The campaign is so linear it becomes monotonous, combined with the boring and cliché characters who didn’t sound like they wanted to voice this game. If you’re into these types of games you might want to wait a while for TransOcean 2 to get patches to sort out lag issues or balance some of the ship classes, as of right now it will take too long to master the game to have fun with it.
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