Kariosoft takes a world cruise to a land we’ve all seen before. Another Kairosoft game lands on the market still sticking to the same menu driven simulation formula made them so popular. This formula is just about as unchanged as ever, especially when compared to Hot Springs story which had the same task of taking an area and filling it with buildings to entertain guests. 
The game has little in the way of surprises from how you’d expect a cruise liner tycoon game to play, in that you’ll be picking up passengers from various places around the world and entertaining them with stores and facilities as you travel to various destinations for them to explore. One of the big hurdles to overcome in HotSprings story was the cultural gap in understanding what an Onsen is and what rooms and objects you should be placing, but you won’t find those same troubles here. To begin with you’ll be running a small cruise ship with just a couple of rooms, an open deck and a vary sparse selection of things to build but through investing and exploring your selection will start to grow. Rooms have to be placed with some care to make sure that everything is accessible and has enough environmental bonuses to boost its attractiveness. 
By investing money in the options that become available you can unlock additional passenger types and rooms. Once enough passengers types in a specific country have become fans (by pleasing them with your attractions) then you can ‘invest’ in having the King/Queen of the country come over to visit, should they be sufficiently impressed then you’ll unlock other countries to take your cruise ship to. Impressing the royalty can be a little tricky at times as not all facilities will impress them and they might randomly choose to spend a fair amount of time at the ATM and bathroom and complain that they didn’t have a great time afterwards. If you fail to impress these tricky passengers you can always invest in them again (at a higher price) and you can quickly hit a wall if you repeatedly fail to impress them when new items to unlock stop becoming available. 
Navigating through the menus and getting things done is as simple as ever although there are a few errors and head scratching oddities. When building you choose between environment, facilities and stores but a tennis court is labeled as a store where as a slot machine is a facility. It can also be tough to work out what might need to be built as there’s no real metric telling if your stores are really doing that well, should you build more of them? The best you can do is build and find out. The menus also tell you misleading information such as that the grey floor “Allows people to walk.” when it does no such thing and you must lay down tiles to allow people to reach their destinations. 
The Kairosoft game type continues to get a little long in the tooth, even though World Cruise Story is a better game than Hot Springs Story, this is mostly thanks to the environment rather than actual mechanics. Hopefully the next Karisoft game will bring some new features to the series or they could just go and set the next game in space.
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