For myself, I personally like that the campaign missions are long and take a while to complete. I let myself get "immersed" with this sim. Sometimes I will take the Walkthrough and explore my ship while I leave the ship sailing on automatic over a long stretch of water. Occasionally I will use my binoculars to look at other boats & ships or enjoy the view of the scenery onshore. I can also appreciate the Orbit view and zooming in and around to see the nice detail of the ship I'm sailing and watch it cutting through the waves. But the large majority of the time I use the Helmsman view and with my WinAmp player tuned into a marine radio channel so I can hear some live ship and harbour-master chatter going on in the background (the built in radio chatter is nice, but is too short and just loops over and over after a few minutes so I now prefer to listen to some live marine radio: http://www.shoutcast.com/Internet-Radio/marine ), and with a bit of imagination I can feel like I'm "really there".
For single missions (not the campaign ones), so far I see there are 3 missions I have. One was the tutorial that came with the sim, and the other two were extra missions I was able to download once I created an account here and registered game's key. And from reading some of the various posts on these forums, I gather that there will be more forthcoming missions, and with a "missions editor" that will soon be available (if I understand correctly), users will be then able to create and share missions too.
Then there is the online multiplayer, though sometimes it doesn't seem too active, I usually find at least one of the public VStep servers having a few other players. I've had fun exploring some of the maps with some other players online and am even forming some friendships with some of the regulars I see there. Though occasionally there will be some trouble-maker - but that's the internet for ya, I'd say the large majority of the people I encounter in online sessions seem mature in attitude, friendly and helpful. "Towing" in multiplayer seems that it can be quite buggy, sometimes it can work, other times the ships attached to each other create some crazy "vortex" in which both ships start spinning around like crazy, in and out of the water, usually resulting in one or both ships being sunk
, and a few other annoyances and bugs I've encountered - mainly with online play.
And then there is Freeroam too, where you can just jump in any ship of your choice and have fun exploring the various maps for as brief or as long as you want. Which I'm glad that the maps are quite large and varied. I also like that I can create different weather and environment conditions.
Despite some of the glitches, bugs and annoyances that can appear sometimes, overall I am much enjoying SSE, I find it's a nice way to relax and a nice change of pace from the typical shooter and racer type of games.
I recently got SSE at the Steam-store during the holiday sales, and so far I've already gotten in about 60+ hours worth of play time with it. I'm still making my way through some of the campaign missions (currently I think I've completed about 6 of the campaign missions) and gradually improving my sailing skills with the various ships. I feel like I definitely got my money's worth from this wonderful sim, and will continue to enjoy it for a long time.
Hopefully the soon forthcoming patch I read about will fix some of the issues with SSE as well as giving us new features and improved gameplay.
Not every game or sim is going to be everyone's "cup of tea", and I can understand that not everyone would have the patience for or would want to spend hours just to complete a single mission. I wasn't sure if I would even like SSE, but decided to give it a chance and I'm glad I have.
