Customer Reviews

Carnival Cruise Line Tycoon 2005: Island Hopping

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Being a fan of simulation games, such as Theme Hospital and Age of Empires for instance, I saw this game and had to have it. I like traveling, I like vacationing on cruise ships, I thought the game would be awesome. Boy was I wrong.

Cruise Line Tycoon is a simple game. The player starts with a small ship. The player must design the ship from the ground up, set pricing, and make enough money to purchase the next larger ship. Once captaining the next ship, a captain for the smaller ship must be hired. This cycle occurs until the largest ship is obtained (about 6 ships total I think).

The problem is the game is overly simplistic. All the components of the ships are pre-designed. Nothing can be customized. Changes in the overall ship design can be made based on passenger feedback, but it seems that no matter what is done, the passengers would complain about the same things over and over again. As other reviewer's have complained, the screen seems eternally dark. Despite another reviewer's suggestion on how to fix the issue, I was never able to remedy this. Also, the game became even more annoying as it seemed to run as slow as molasses in January when it is run along with even a single other windows application. This was happening despite running the game on a 2.2 GHz PC with 128 MB of RAM (where only 64 MB of RAM and a 500MHz CPU are required)

The game could have definitely benefited from some additions. Disasters and obstacles such as hurricanes, a dockworker's union strike, maybe a case of Legionnaires disease on board, on board crime sprees, corrupt foreign governments, economic downturns, etc. The possibilities could have been endless, and I think it would have made the game awesome. At the very least, I think allowing the player to make their own cruise routes would have made the game tolerable.

I recommend staying away from this game. It is entertaining for only a short while. Save your $20 and go buy something else.

Nice game! It's quite easy to master but gives some real cruise feeling. There are many options and different ships, and they are built after real Carnival ships. You can build guest rooms, bars, shops, theaters, pools, and more. You can cruise the Caribbean, travel to Alaska or Hawaii. The game comes without a manual but with a tutorial that teaches you the basic functionality. Once you have found out how to generate some money, it's fun to advance on your way and become a mighty tycoon. If you don't expect a hardcore tycoon game for genre experts, you'll have lots of fun with Carnival Cruise Line Tycoon.

This game is great fun for about three hours, until you realize that you have purchased every item available, bought every ship, and no longer have anything else to do except repeat the game. It seems more like a advertisement for carnival ships quickly thrown together into a video game. Don't get me wrong its fun for a little while, but just is way too simple and doesn't hold your attention once you've done everthing. Its the sort of game you play once then sell or put away for a year till you are interested in playing again.

Originally this game was supposed to be named "Cruise Ship Tycoon 2". The original developer, Cat Daddy games was switched out for Artex software, which I imagine had something to do with the reason the name was changed to Cruise Line Tycoon: Island Hopping 2005. Isn't Carnival also a cruise company?
Name aside, this game looks and acts pretty much like its predecessor. Some bugs have been fixed and game play is a little ironed out, but it still suffers with some glaring omissions which should be standard tycoon fair by now (like staff and building management for example).

If you are unfamiliar with the aforementioned predecessor Cruise Ship Tycoon, here's a brief sum up. A 2 and a half to 3 star budget tycoon where you set up a ship in a zoo tycoon/sims manner, plopping down cabins for your customers and amenities etc for them to enjoy. You also had to set the course of the ship on a map, to avoid rocks and random weather occurrences. It could have been much better, but was entertaining for a while.
One of the biggest problems that plagued the first cruise ship tycoon were guests that were never pleased. You could plop down 10000 benches and they would still complain that there weren't enough. This has been toned down a bit in cruise line tycoon, although there are ALWAYS complaints. The important thing to remember is that the percentage of complaints does not represent, for example, that 25% of the people are complaining about the food. It means 25% of the complainers are. And thank god, benches only need to be placed outside on the deck now.

It's nice to not have set down 10 food places on a tiny ship and have them still complain, but control over these buildings has NOT improved. It would be awful nice if we could do something as simple as set the price, or see how much money it had made, or even how many visitors had been there. But no. You see the condition and the value when you sell it, any guests that are in there at the moment, and any staff that works there. You can't even cycle through the buildings, but have to find them one by one and click on them. The staff management isn't any better. No information can be gained on them individually from any screen unless you zoom all the way in and click on the constantly moving employee. And then you get barely any information, and can't manage salary or raises in any manner. Did I mention they also get stuck in the pre-designed buildings? You would think since they made the object, they would've made sure the little waiters etc wouldn't get caught in between the benches they placed!

Getting back on a positive track, the silly thing where you had to constantly sway around a rock every time you took a certain route and calculate how many supplies you needed then (risking running out and having to be towed in) has been removed. Now you just see your boat moving from place to place and can upgrade places where you have ports, so you have more routes available.
There are several other various improvements/changes. An upgrade button is now on cabins, so instead of deleting a cheap one to add an expensive, you now just click on a button. View rotation is also improved. People are a bit easier to please (especially the cheap classers).

Hitting a sour note however, is challenge mode. Exact same challenges as Cruise Ship Tycoon as far as I can see. Which takes a lot of the fun and meaning of "sequel" out of this game.

It's a fun game for a while, but ultimately has too many game play issues and too little management capabilities to be of long lasting value. Basically, even with the improvements, if you own Cruise Ship Tycoon, you own Carnival Lines Tycoon.

As an avid cruiser, I purchased this game with great excitement; how fun it would be to design my own 'Fun Ship'? I was rather disappointed in the product.
The game's only excitement comes visually, as the graphics are rich, smooth and the zoom/pan features of the camera can give every conceivable view of your ship. The interface is simple and easy to understand, but considering the limited features of the game, this is hardly a positive aspect.
The A.I. is slow witted and dull, as the guests constantly complain about not having enough of something, regardless of how many of the thing they are complaining about you have. The management aspect is virtually non-existent; the only staffing options consist of placing a staffed structure and perhaps clicking a button a few times to hire additional staff. Other aspects of running a cruise line such as maintenance issues, provisioning, advertising, competition, disasters, navigation and money management simply do not exist; the only thing one can do in this game is place structures (cabins, bars, restrooms, etc.)
While this game will entertain for a few hours, upon building and launching the 'Conquest' class vessel (level '5' for all intents and purposes), you have nothing more to do then start over again. Pass this one over unless you are a real fan of cruising.

Let me sum up this game in one sentence: this game is horrible. What a rip off. Don't believe anything on the product descrpition. "Carnival Cruise Tycoon is so close to the real thing--you'll think you are actually on-board," What a lie!! First of all, when you start sailing, you only fill in a few decks. The rest are all empty! It gets really annoying when the waiters at the resturants get stuck between tables and can't serve anyone. It's so hard to describe how bad this game is. It's just a badly made game. Please don't buy. It's for your own good. A waste of money.

For just under twenty dollars buy this game. As are most games the game has a few glitches that effect the game like slow speeds, turning objects, etc, etc but other than that an excellent game. The game is very fun here and you won't want to quit. A word of advise buy the game.

This is a really good idea for a simulation game, but there are so many things that could be so much ebtter about it. It's very limited in the types of objects you can purchase and it would be better if you could choose your route. Anyway, it's a pretty easy game so it would be good for kids, but it doesn't take long to master it (like three hours or less.)

This game is nice! Now when Cruise Ship Tycoon came out I bought it and was dissapointed at how many bugs it had. Then I bought Carnival Cruise Lines Tycoon 2005:Island Hopping. I liked the idea because when I bought it I had been on 5 Carnival Cruises and really like the line. The game play goes that you start with a little ferry and when you finished it and have enough money you buy the Celebration, a real-life Carnival Cruise ship, and game goes on like that. This game is a lot like Cruise Ship Tycoon but the company fixed most of the bugs. Now it is easier to please passengers. I totally reccomend this to people who own and like Cruise Ship Tycoon, and to anybody who has been on a Carnival Cruise.

I really, really wanted this game for Christmas. When I saw it at the store, I got excited because the cover photo looked like a fun cruise ship with all kinds of amenities. I wanted to make a ship like that. However, there's no sunshine in the actual game and it looks like it's always night. On the main menu, you can select INSTANT ACTION which brings you straight to the larger ships and you can choose which one you want to build on. If you click on START CAREER, you are given a pathetic four-deck ferry to show the people at Carnival that you can actually handle a ship. Forty thousand dollars (twice as much as I started with), twenty booked guestrooms and seven days later, Carnival had still not handed me a real ship. I finally got bored and went to INSTANT ACTION and chose the biggest ship possible. Although there are many negatives to this game, there are just as many positives. I like how you can design your route and also think that the amenities, which include a swimming pool, shuffleboard and basketball courts, shops, bars, restaurants, a spa and a fitness center are really awesome. Another thing I like is that there are three levels of guest rooms: blue, yellow and red. (These colors are the main decoration in the guest rooms) Inside these levels there are three different kinds of rooms, (for example, in the blue level there is an Economy Stateroom, a Superior Stateroom and a Standard Suite.) I have not had this game for long and am still working on cheats and stuff like that, but I think it's pretty much worth it.