Back in 1998 Half Life revolutionised the gaming market. Not only with its gameplay, graphics and multiplayer, but also with the tools it provided for enthusiasts to create new maps and mods. In the following years Half Life became one of the most modified games of all times, spawning several popular “mods” like the well known Counterstrike, Day of Defeat and Natural Selection. One of the most innovative was “The Ship”. It combined first person action with elements from the Sims and glued it all together with the essence of the tabletop game Clue. The Ship: Source is, as the name suggests, a port of the game to the Source engine which was recently released on Steam as a stand-alone commercial game.

Maxwell's silver hammer

The Ship brings to the table what the Hitman series failed to deliver – multiplayer assasination. As you can probably imagine the gameplay mechanics had to be changed to accommodate the fact that players would probably notice a strange assassin walking amidst them. Even more importantly, it wouldn't be much fun for only two players to be the hitman and victim while the rest would be just innocent bystanders. The authors Outerlight countered all of the above with a simple solution: they made everyone the assassin and the victim at the same time.

Since senseless killing is frowned upon pretty much everywhere, the game takes place on a private cruiser ship in the 1920s. All of the passengers were given a free ticket by the owner of the ship, Mr X. Once on board they realise that they have fallen into a trap from which the only exit is to take a part of the Hunt and win.

The bulk of the gameplay revolves around the player trying to locate their designated victim while at the same time avoiding the assassin who has the player as their target. The catch is that all the players get a random appearance and name every round, so nobody knows how their assailant and victim will look. This mystery factor gives the game a quality not found in other titles with some players going as far as playing psychological tricks on their victims or other seemingly innocent passengers. The feeling of uneasiness you get when one of the passengers keeps following you around the ship is hard to describe as is the look on the face of your victim, once they realise they are your target.

Am I getting Paranoid?

The game offers several play modes including the classic deathmatch. For those looking for something new there is the Hunt mode, where every player is assigned a victim. After the first victim gets eliminated, the rest of the players have a limited amount of time to find and kill their quarries. Killing the other players earns you money while getting killed by your assassin will make you lose some. The winner is the first person to earn a certain amount of money. The second new mode is the so called Elimination mode. In it the players still get to kill a certain individual, but upon killing him they get a new name to dispose off. The last person to stay alive is the winner. For people who are looking for a single player experience The Ship is not recommended, as the only single player mode available is the so called Arcade mode, which is basically a regular match against AI opponents.

So far I have explained aspects the title has borrowed from other first person titles and by now you should have realised what it took from the game Clue. As for what it inherited from the Sims – this happens to be the needs system. Every player character in the game has several needs that have to be kept under control during the game. These needs are hunger, thirst, hygiene needs, the need for sleep, poo and pee needs (no we aren’t making this up, that's how the game refers to them), finally we have the need to have fun which includes socialising requirements. To keep them all fulfilled we need to perform various tasks, these include - dancing, eating, talking to the NPCs and other players, using the toilet and sleeping.

The edge this brings to the title is wonderful as while performing any of these actions we are pretty much sitting ducks, making the work of our assassin much easier. Many would ascertain that it could very well be easier to ignore these, however if you do so, in time you will pass out. Obviously passing out when being tracked by our assassin is a quick recipe for death, so it is wise to pay attention to the requirements.

Since some of the ships can be extremely big, players are given a helping hand when trying to locate their game, a blueprint of the ship with periodic updates on the location of the quarry. These updates are far apart, making the hunting err on the side of a guessing game. They also let the players form their own strategies for intercepting the victim based on their behaviour. To prevent mindless killing the ships are all equipped with cameras and have security guards guarding most of the important locations. This forces the players to try and corner their victims in faraway parts of this ship, but hunting away from the crowd also gives your would be assassin the perfect opportunity to strike. Another aid for the victims (and murderers as well) is the ability to change clothes, giving you some breathing space when the killer (or victim) has already found you, but temporarily lost sight of you.

This leads me to one of the Clue questions – “What was the murder weapon?” In The Ship you are given a wealthy arsenal of items, such as, baseball bats, golf clubs, fire axes, flare guns, hammers, poison, mannequin arms (my favourite), tommy guns, katanas and more. As if this wasn't enough you can even kill your quarry by pushing them overboard, dropping a lifeboat on them or cooking them up in the sauna!

Things Get Ugly

As with all things, The Ship is not perfect. The sad thing is, this is mainly due to the human players themselves and not the authors, or a fault with the game code. Why? Well most of the time the players will act as if the game is just another run of the mill first person shooter title, making no effort to hide the fact that they want to kill you. This removes suspense, since you find out soon enough who wants to kill you and you can try to kill them to save your hide (if you kill the wrong guy you lose money). Even worse than this is the fact that you will often get killed in plain sight of a guard, who will not react to the killing leaving him to walk way unscathed instead of being sent to the brig (where they have to spend some time before returning to the game).

The graphics are not amazing, but they do a good job at presenting the cruiser ships in all their glory. Player models have a cartoon style look with exaggerated hands and thin limbs, so the whole appearance takes out some of the seriousness of killing. The ships themselves look authentic enough and some of the rooms are well detailed, but the larger spaces (dining halls and such) feel a bit empty due to the simplistic style they were made in. Obviously this is to aid those playing online with slower machines and broadband connections.

There is no soundtrack per se, but the ships are filled with radios which play the music from the early twenties, giving the game a reasonably authentic feel. Sound effects are well done and help make the game even more cartoon like with several funny sounds playing at various events.

Final Thoughts

The lack of a single player component weighs heavily on this title, as there aren't many servers available especially at peak times. Playing online will sometimes make you curse the game due to some weird line of sight issues of the guards, cameras and other players. However all negatives aside playing under the right conditions – on a full server with people who actually roleplay is an experience that is hard to match. People who have played the Hitman games the “stealthy way” and preferred it over going in guns blazing should definitely give this game a try, especially if they yearned for a multiplayer aspect to Hitman.