ShipCrafter: the physics are impeccable, the editor is a punishment

One player wrote the most precise review anybody could write about this game: you spend an hour designing a ship, and five minutes later you unlock a part that forces you to design another one.

They gave it 8 out of 10. So, roughly, do I.

What the game actually simulates

Because it does simulate, and the detail is worth unpacking.

Buoyancy is computed in real time, from weight and submerged volume. Your ship's density and centre of mass are displayed in the editor. Which means you can fine-tune your vessel's trim, and that you can build a submarine using ballasts.

So is the ballistics. Shell trajectories account for air pressure and how it changes with altitude, and for the influence of speed on drag. Penetration is calculated from armour thickness, angle of incidence, a bounce probability, and the shell's speed and mass.

And damage is physical, not health bars. A turret that gets hit loses performance. So does an engine.

The studio owns up to one honest liberty: speeds and distances are reduced relative to reality, because in life it would take over a minute to hit a target twenty kilometres away. That is the right call, and saying so openly on the store page is appreciated.

There is also a weather system with day cycles, which varies wave amplitude and brings rain. And since buoyancy depends on waves, weather is not decoration: your ship does not behave the same in a heavy sea.

And around it

A campaign of over fifty missions liberating Europe, with more than twenty enemy ships to defeat.

A custom battle mode where you choose the weather and the time of day, and where you can start bot versus bot naval battles. Which is to say you can watch two of your own creations fight without touching anything, exactly the sort of thing one does at two in the morning.

A multiplayer sandbox for up to ten people, with damage toggleable, so either a naval battle or a showroom.

The Steam Workshop is in place and working. Modding is officially supported. And there is a raytracing renderer whose only purpose is making handsome screenshots of your ships.

For 7.79 euros.

Now the editor

And here I have to spoil the mood, because this is the central complaint and it is justified.

You cannot select and copy an existing block. You cannot move an existing block. Every time you want to place the same element again, you reopen the side menu, find it, place it, and colour it.

In a building game, the editor is not an interface, it is the game. An editor where the most frequent action takes four steps is an editor billing you for your time.

And there is almost no tutorial. The game explains nothing. Several players describe an incomprehensible build mode and an immediate refund, and I cannot blame them: the simulation is excellent, assuming you get through the door.

Third complaint, less serious but real: blocks do not detach or break apart. Impacts leave marks. In a game that computes penetration by angle of incidence, watching a shell pierce a hull without tearing material away is a broken visual promise.

And the submarine system is judged too basic, which limits the designs built around it.

So who is it for

For people who have already spent an evening tuning the centre of mass of something. You know who you are.

Two hundred and fifty-two positive reviews out of two hundred and seventy-seven, a very favourable reception, and two hundred people online at once. A small community, but a community of builders, and on the Workshop it shows immediately.

My own moment was the first submarine. It took me forty minutes to understand that my problem was not ballast power but the position of my centre of mass, and when it finally dived level instead of nosing down, I said something out loud in an empty room.

A game that produces that for eight euros earns a great deal of leniency about its interface. Not total leniency, but a great deal.

Got a hull that holds in a heavy sea? Share the Workshop link on the InsertCoins Discord, we already have a fleet.