Design it, Drive it : Speedboats (Steam VR)

VR Shop Score – Bronze Award

System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £18.99
Comfort Rating: Red
Genre: Tool,
Input: Keyboard & Mouse
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG

 

Description: “Design it, Drive it: Speedboats” is a speedboat simulator with high fidelity physics that lets you design and drive your own speedboats from dozens of adjustable parameters on a Windows PC, then compete against other players via leaderboards in top speed shootouts, solo time trials on lapped or point to point courses, or just free drive as you please to explore the world and your design’s handling characteristics with no constraints. Whether you end up with boats that are slow, fast, turn well, chine walk, or tend to blow over at high speeds or not depends on what you do with the shape and design of the hull.

This is not your typical boat game. It’s more of a design tool and physics sandbox/waterbox, a serious, hardcore simulator used by real lifeboat racers around the world including Formula 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, offshore powerboat, and other series racers to keep their skills sharp between races and train muscle memory. Real-life high-performance boat driving skills such as chine walk control and engine trim management can be learned safely.

Review: I think it is REALLY important to fully understand what Design it, Drive it: Speedboats really is. This is no “Wave Runner” speed boat racing game, this is essentially a speed boat design tool and features more options than you could ever imagine to give you the tool to make the perfect speed boat and tweak handing, speed and a host of other things. It’s also worth pointing out that I know diddy squat about speedboats. But even to me, it is clear that this is a serious tool with VR bolted onto it and I can only look at it from a VR standpoint. All you can do in VR is test-drive the boats. No racing, to challenges, just test your own creations.

For most people, this will be boring as hell and basically pointless, but to those who know what they are talking about and doing, I am sure this is a great simulator and one that is well worth playing. Just make sure you download this because you want a speedboat simulator and not just for the VR aspect. So do note that the score I have given this is based on my opinion of the VR part of this game only and not the whole game itself.