Rhine maiden voyage

Street Cleaning Simulator, Garbage Truck Simulator, Utility Vehicle Simulator, Stone Quarry Simulator, Underground Mining Simulator… in 2011, German publisher Astragon was pumping out so-so sims like a Flakpanzer Gepard pumps out Shahed drone shredders. Confronted with this deluge of dross, I and, I suspect, many others failed to give one Astragon release the attention or praise it deserved.

Thanks for drawing my attention to River Simulator 2012, gombicek! Judging by the pleasant afternoon I’ve just spent in the company of its demo, this elderly inland waterways sim had and has plenty going for it, and can scratch itches modern peers such as NAUTIS Home struggle to reach.

‘Anna Lisa’, the trial’s prosaic bulk carrier, is much more engaging and demanding than she first appears. While you don’t get to stride her decks, endanger her hull plates, or fully manage her engine, her tripartite steering system, clickable 3D bridge, and plausible reluctance to slow down, endow her with lots of character.

* Collisions cause no damage.

Maneuvering into and out of the docks that dot the game’s 200 kilometre stretch of simmed Rhine without causing imagined dents and scratches, takes focus and skill.

Often you’re juggling the throttle, bow thrusters, and the ‘time rudder’* simultaneously.

* The gentler ‘way rudder’ is used when navigating sweeping bends.

Out on the river, relatively dense traffic, buoy-marked diversions, and detailed wayside scenery ensures ‘slow simming’ rarely becomes ‘soporific simming’. The fact that Weltenbauer went to the trouble of adding animated trains and cars, speaks volumes.

During the one trip I’ve completed thus far – a twenty-kilometre sand delivery run from Andernach to Koblenz – I don’t recall noticing the needle on the depth sounder move, or feeling the Rhine nudge my prow when turning into the docks at my destination. Current and bathymetric modelling may well be areas where NAUTIS Home has an edge.

The fact that I passed a couple of collisions en route suggest that there may be room for improvement in River Sim’s AI/pathfinding department too.

As Anna Lisa is no speedboat and I refused to cut corners by using time acceleration, there was a palpable sense of achievement when I finally moored below the bucket cranes at Koblenz. Perhaps next time I’ll magnify that satisfaction hit by manually unloading my cargo on arrival.

9 Comments

  1. Definitely pop out at Koblenz. The town is well worth a visit, there’s a glorious fortress on the other side of the river and a couple of castles there too.

    We need a ‘boat down the Weser’ game too, modelling all the castles and sights of that valley. It can end at Verdun, a sobering walk, then let you switch to the Meuse, which becomes the Maas, and suddenly you’re doing Market Garden and back onto the Rhine.

    It’s a great drive, suspect it’s a gorgeous river cruise too.

  2. A shame one can’t get this simulator that easily. Like on Steam.

    Reminds me of the difficulty in finding content for MSTS/Openrails when most of the websites are gone. Like UKTrainsim where they offered CDs with routes for 5 pounds, and then we can’t find the routes or cd’s anywhere anymore.

    You guys have no idea how many boxes I had to open at my home just to find the Dorset Coast v3 CD.

    So it is sad to see simulators like this, which seems to have had real care in being made, be forgotten or be difficult to get :/

  3. I got given a copy of this at Gamescom in 2012, don’t remember it looking this good so maybe I need to try it on a modern PC.

    Either way, seems this box has become more valuable than I ever imagined 😀

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