Previous Next

"Good Luck!" heartily encourages the instruction manual of Advanced Destroyer Simulator on its final page. Of course, exactly what it means by this is open to discussion. Perhaps it is wishing you "Good Luck" for ploughing through the instructions, although (assuming that you'd naturally read the last page first!) little good luck is really necessary. Delightedly, the flimsy ten pages of instructions highlight just enough to get you going; you have been set a number of missions during World War II, all of which involve mastering one of the Royal Navy's Destroyers on a mission to take out non-allied ships within three different settings (The Mediterranean, The English Channel and the Norwegian Fjords).

Possibly the instructions are wishing you "Good Luck" in getting to grips with the game itself. Unlikely - controls of the ship have been restricted to the joystick for moving, and a few keys for cannons, torpedoes, binoculars, maps and damage reports. For an advanced destroyer simulator, it's not exactly overly advanced.

Don't expect to have to spend hours before you really know what you're doing either - training missions are available to get you into both the mood and the swing of things.

However, what you may not have so much luck with is actually enjoying yourself. Burning around, shooting baddy ships and burning home again is essentially all you have to do, and without Armour-Geddon's vehicles to pilot, without Hunter's graphics and without the speed and excitement of most flight sims, Advanced Destroyer Simulator seems a decidedly limp re-release indeed.

Lacking action and depth, this is one 'boat' sim that just never really gets off the ground. Even at £7.99, it's not really worth wasting time with.