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The Ship Review - PC

Introduction

"Mr X" invites you out with free tickets to a luxury 1920's ocean liner. Too good to be too? Sure, as unsuspicious as being offered a free holiday to Bali! Here you receive your sinister instructions. You must take out your quarry, and avoid being noticed as you do so, or your family will die. Not only that, but as you are hunting somebody else, somebody is hunting you!

The Ship is a different game concept, based upon a familiar genre not often touched upon in gaming – and that is the suspense thriller. Available as a Steam download, or through retail purchase, you play online against other like-minded players as you explore the Ship, and take out your opposition.

Like Counterstrike, and others before it, the game started off in 2004 as a collaborative free mod to the original Half Life 1 engine. With the concept being one worth pursuing a bit further into a more commercial venture – The Ship has been redesigned, and repacked into a slightly more modern version for today, using the Source engine of Half Life 2. While it does use the Source engine, the game is stand-alone, and does not require Half Life 2.

Gameplay

Primarily a multiplayer game, to begin the hunt you choose a server, and the game starts with up to 32 players. There are four core modes available - Hunter, is kill your target before they kill you, and the most common online. Elimination, where if you are killed you have to sit out the rest of the round until only one player remains. Then there is Duel, or a one on one murder-off. The final one is Deathmatch, where you can simply murder anybody, however you still have to avoid detection from the authorities.

While the concept at first seems quite simple, it does take a few hours to get into things, and get the most out of the game. At first, when you're dumped into "The Ship", everything seems a little confusing and you'll stumble around blindly for a while, working out just what you're meant to be doing. The tutorial does help, and does save a bit of time with learning things. The steep interest curve may immediately turn some players off, but it is worth pursuing further beyond that initial confusion.

To start with, you're placed on one of the maps for "The Ship" with a fixed bank account, along with your other players, and given a named target to dispose of. The game is divided into a number of rounds, in which you have a certain amount of time to achieve your kill. In this time, you also have to avoid being killed by your own hunter (who is different to who you are hunting).

The end goal is fairly simple. If you kill your quarry, you receive a monetary reward (continued next page)