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I admit, I spent some time in the Navy during the nineties. The sailor’s life wasn’t for me. Ocean Express, developed by Hipsoft and ported to OSX by Red Marble games tried to bring out the efficient packer in me with Tetris pieces and the pre-planning of where to put irregular packages that I thought I had lost almost a decade ago. Is this game engaging enough for for you, the discriminating Macintosh gaming enthusiast to drop your hard earned bucks on?Gameplay Ocean Express is an inlay-themed puzzle game, where you are presented an array of pieces randomly selected by the game, many in the style of Tetris pieces. In the guise of an oceanic shipping company, your job is to take these pieces and cram them into shipping containers with varying sizes and shapes of available space (which don’t resemble any shipping container I've ever seen) so that the container is as close to perfectly full as possible. Against sailor tradition, "mechanical agitation" to make a piece fit in a space where it wouldn’t normally fit is not possible. Make do with what you're provided, squid! Each piece you drop gives you a cash bonus, and placement of special packages such as Seattle Coffee, New York Pizza, Maine Crab, and others gives you more cash! Before you get all full of yourself as a veteran of many a Tetris marathon session, you have two forces acting against you, other than the random selection! The departure time clock ticks down against you, even while you sit and think of where to put a package for maximum efficiency. If time ticks away, then consider that barge done, whether or not you were ready to ship! Additionally, each set of containers you fill per stage has to exceed a certain dollar amount. Not meeting shipping dollar amounts is the real killer- you only get a set amount of retries, and once those are exhausted, it's game over. No extra life for 10000 points, no quarter sitting on the bezel of your LCD for "nexts". It's over. Restart.I keep mentioning Tetris pieces. While it is true that most of the pieces are Tetris-esque, some of the rest of the filler pieces aren't. Smaller pieces are periodically provided by the game, all the way down to a 1 square by 2 square block. There are some mental gymnastics required to add those to your repertoire, as it's still in your best interest, as it was in Tetris, to make rectangles and squares out of the pieces and to figure out how best to deal with an outcropping of blocks whether it be provided by the puzzle board or by your own poor tile placement. During the endgame of each individual container, the game selects more pieces you can fit in your grid than ones you can't, but don't count on getting the exact piece you need, until the very end. During the course of the game, you have seven or so pieces on the conveyor to choose from to drop in the containter. To make more room on the container, you toss pieces in the ocean, at a cost to your bottom line, penalized against your running shipping total. This cost escalates as you toss more packages in the ocean, as well it should, so don’t count on being
able to discard dozens of packages looking for just the right one. When you can't fill any more of the container, and there's still space left, you do get penalized for each space unfilled and this penalty escalates in the same way the tossed cargo does. Fill that container, or pay the price! Some shipping container puzzles are provided with the initial game download. There's an option in game to always download new puzzles from the Hipsoft Ocean Express community site, and this happens transparently to the player. The Hipsoft community creates the puzzles, and there is a review process before the submitted puzzle is added to the download queue, to ensure that you aren’t downloading something generated by an Ocean Express sadist, designed with only your failure in mind. The online community extends to leaderboards too. Some of the scores are ridiculously high, and while I thought I was pretty good at the game, all it took was a gander at the high score list of all time to realize I was a small fish in a big ocean. Each level cleared is followed by a reward of tokens to spend in the Ocean Express store. This store allows you to purchase more containers for your tug, and other ports of call. Purchasing an additional port of call unlocks the special and oddly shaped cargo for that port that I mentioned previously. These special cargoes are where the big bucks are- where you might collect $100 for a normal cargo piece, the special pieces can be worth up to $925 for placement. A balance needs to be struck between ports of call and additional cargo containers per stage. Too much of one, and not enough of another, and you won't clear higher stages- you won’t have the raw resources to do so. Graphics and Sound For the game and genre, the graphics and sound effects are ideal. The game presents itself in a perfect top-down, no forced 3D perspectives to worry about in piece dropping. A Naval shipping metaphor fits the gameplay well, and the concept doesn't feel shoehorned into the graphic design, or vice versa. As is the case with most casual games, the background music is repetitive. I'm not expecting the soundtrack for Halo when I play casual games, but the same three minutes of music looped just makes my brain ache.I play most casual games in a window rather than full screen, so I can monitor other things going on while I'm playing. If I need to shoot a quick email off in response to a co-worker or client's communication, Ocean Express pauses itself, and the time remaining doesn't tick down when I open up a window for another application. This is a fantastic feature, and I wish every timed game developer would implement this. Criticisms As it stands, Ocean Express is fun. It draws you in quickly, and you end up playing for some time at a stretch. At some point, you wish there was a little more to the game. Maybe a conveyor that moves pieces you don't use off the board slowly, maybe other hazards to your cargo, or cargo pieces that can't be placed adjacent to each other. Otherwise, the game mechanics are fun, and easy to grasp. I found no significant bugs in the game, on either a Mac Pro tower, a PPC Mac Mini, or on a Macbook.The Final Verdict Ocean Express is a good test or refresher course for your spatial awareness skills. The presentation of the game won't turn anybody off, and the gameplay is enough to keep you coming back, at least for a little while. Any quibbles I had with the game are minor, and shouldn’t stop you from picking Ocean Express up, assuming you're in the market for a casual game.
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