There used to be a variety of management sims during the 2000s that focused on giving players the keys in controlling the workings of practically anything. Cruise Ship Manager captures some of the charms of those older titles, though whether that’s intentional is debatable.

This is a far cry compared to other management games that have come out in recent years, such as Two Point Hospital. Games such as that aim more towards humor and their zany setting rather than worrying deeply about the efficiency in which one runs their business.

So is Cruise Ship Manager a solid call back to those classic management games of the past, or is this going to turn out to be a shipwreck? Found out in our review below.

Cruise Ship Manager
Developer: Image Power S.A
Publisher: Image Power S.A
Platforms: Windows PC (Reviewed)
Release Date: May 24, 2023
Players: 1
Price: $9.99 USD 

Immediately what’s clear upon starting the game is how dated it looks. Now, it is a budget title with a budget price to go along with it. So there’s no expectation for any awe inspiring graphics.

Because of this, Cruise Ship Manager looks more akin to a game of its genre from back in the 2000s era. Yet without any marketing of being a throwback title, this comparison is more that they were unable to use modern upgrades we’ve seen since, rather than an intentional homage.

Character models are bland to even downright ugly and most of the ship itself leaves a lot to be desired. Even after some upgrades, there isn’t anything interesting in the presentation to make up for its lackluster display.

Of course anyone can overlook this given that nothing is outright terrible as long as the gameplay makes up for it. Unfortunately, gameplay lacks just as much as its presentation.

The main idea of the game is that you’re running a cruise ship where you have to manage the work during each set cruise. A cruise in this game is where you decide upon the destination and sell tickets for said trip.

There are two distinct situations where you’ll have the ability to make decisions in the hopes of making the most money while maintaining your budget. That would be when the ship is docked at the numerous different locations and during the cruises themselves.

During docked is when you make the decision on where to go next. At the start of the game, there are few ports to select, but more get unlocked as you build up your reputation which unlocks new destinations.

New destinations go beyond just being another place to take your ship. They also contain unique rooms for you to be able to purchase and upgrade for your ship in order to provide more for your guests. So there are reasons to expand and also return to early locations.

After you decide on where to go and have your ship in order, the rest is rather simple with selling tickets, hiring staff, and buying resources such as fuel as you head out on a cruise.

The cruise section is rather monotonous and boring, but is also where you’ll spend most of your time playing Cruise Ship Manager. It also contains plenty of game logic that makes no sense at all for players.

The main part is that you’ll assign up your employees to various stations. There are important role such as captain, which is required, and other minor roles such as being a cook in a diner or being a bartender.

Success comes from having employees with good skills for their assigned roles in order to keep guests happy and maintain the ship at top condition. Which brings about one of the major oddities when it comes to Cruise Ship Manager’s design.

Workers get tired as they work, which is common for management games. Yet for some reason in this one, what happens is that their skills that are needed to perform at their given role are the ones that get reduced the more they work there.

It makes no sense at all, but the way to handle this isn’t to simply give those workers a break, but to instead swap around everyone’s role so they can work at something they haven’t tired of. It doesn’t make any sense and serves as busywork as you try to shift everyone around to keep things ideal.

The other problem is that not much else happens during the cruises. There’s some random events, such as a fire starting out of nowhere, but most of what the players will find themselves handling are telling someone to clean or fix something.

This is made more annoying in that there is a role for someone to be a janitor, which requires an unnecessarily large room to have employable. However they can only be assigned to patrol 10 rooms, which is not even half of what’s possible even with the smallest ship.

So the player needs to keep an eye out for any messes or broken beds to tell a worker to handle. This seems to be by design, given that there’s an achievement to give this command 100 times, which makes it all the more baffling that this is how the game’s meant to be played.

Finally comes VIP guests, which are special guests you can sell tickets to that make more money, but also have more demands. When it comes to the early game, they are poorly designed and bring more harm, yet are needed in order to make big cash to progress.

The issue comes from their special wants, which usually comes in the form of the ship having a certain room or amenity for them to enjoy. They will have wants of things that you won’t have access to until later in the game, which means you get penalized for selling them the ticket in the first place, even though you don’t know what these people want until after the cruise starts.

Ultimately, Cruise Ship Manager is a limited title with clearly a limited budget. There isn’t much to do during the actual cruises themselves when it comes to you managing things in order to have guests be happy.

The stuff that you do have direct control over also happens to be mundane and hardly an entertaining way to spend any time playing a video game. Sure, it’s a title that doesn’t cost much, but it’s honestly not even worth that much and there are much better things to do with your time.

It doesn’t matter how big of a fan you are of management sims. Cruise Ship Manager should be avoided and you should be giving attention to the plenty of other games that fill out the genre.

Cruise Ship Manager was reviewed on PC using a code provided by Image Power S.A. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy can be found here. Cruise Ship Manager is now available for Windows PC (via Steam).