Publisher: Iceberg Interactive
Developer: Stentec Software
Minimum requirements: Windows XP, Vista, or 7; 2.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent; 1 GB RAM (XP) or 2 GB RAM (Vista/7); 128 MB NVidia GeForce 6100 (ATI X600) or better Shader 3.0 compatible graphics card; 4x CD-ROM drive; 500 MB free HD space; DirectX Version 9.0c or better
Genre: Sim
Release Date: Available now

I was a bit skeptical at first as to whether or not I would be able to properly review Sail Simulator 2010 (also called Sail Simulator 5). Growing up almost 8 hours away from the ocean has left me ill-prepared to delve into the realm of jib sheets, spinnaker sheets, outhauls, downhauls, mainstays, canting keels, and all those other nautical terms. After getting into the game, however, I found myself pleasantly surprised.

Sail Simulator 2010 is exactly what it says on the tin. There is no story mode to the game, which I expected. But you can select one of five different sailboats (two one-man and three two-man boats) and set up almost every variable you can imagine, from major factors such as wind speed, wave height, and weather, all the way down to the weight and activity level of your crewmembers. The activity level, by the way, indicates how quickly the crewmember reacts to the movements of the boat.

You can also choose one of four spectacular locations: Scheveningen, Cabrera, Koh Hong, or Treasure Island. You can then set up your own course, or use one of the predefined courses in the game, and share your courses with other players online, and engage in races against other players, complete with a session ranking and personal ranking system. When you are sailing, you will have access to every modern navigational aid used by competitive teams, including the Global Positioning System (GPS), echo sounder, and navigation charts.

What impressed me the most is that the designers even considered us poor landlocked wannabe-sailors. If you don’t understand knots, meters, kilograms, and liters, you can change the measurements to miles, feet, pounds, and gallons, either individually or with one of the four presets (nautical, metric, nautical US, or US) which sets all measurements at once. Also, the system requirements are surprisingly reasonable. At full detail, the graphics are incredibly detailed and realistic, but you can turn the graphics settings down until the game will run on much less sophisticated hardware. I even got the game to run acceptably on my 10-year-old backup computer, which only has a GeForce 6600 card.

If there is one weakness to this game, I think it would have benefited greatly from some kind of tutorial, and also tooltips for all the different buttons on the interface. A sailing simulator is a niche market to begin with, but a tutorial and tooltips might have broadened that niche somewhat and also made it easier for the already-experienced to master. You simply cannot skim the instruction manual for a few seconds and jump right into the game; you have to know what all those sheets and jibs and other terms are and how they work, as well as at least the basics of sailing, unless you want to spend all your time on autopilot, letting the computer control the boat.

Overall, though, this is a very decent game, especially for those who already have some experience with sailing but can’t go down to the water as often as they’d like, or those who are just simulator fanatics who dream of being a sailor and don’t mind the learning curve. For them this title is a definite “Buy It”. And, in this day and age where some games fill two double-sided DVDs and require 10 or 15 gigabytes of hard drive space (I’m looking at you, Aliens vs. Predator!), it’s refreshing to find a game that fits on a single CD.

Our Score:

Our Recommendation: