Docked Review - Under Pier‑formance

Ole Gamer Joe
7 hours ago
6 min read

DOCKED

PC/PS/XBOX

3/5/26

Saber Interactive

You’ve docked a Nintendo Switch, perhaps your pay was docked for showing up late to work, hell, this review was written on a Google doc, but how much do you REALLY know about docks? Well, I now know more than I ever wanted thanks to DOCKED from Saber Interactive, a video game where, much like that guy from those Planet Fitness commercials, you get to lift things up and put them down! But does this realistic simulation of working the docks translate well to the video game format? Or is it all work and no play? Why don’t we find out in our full review?

There seems to be a simulator for just about everything these days. You can mow the lawn, power wash a house, run a food truck, or maybe even own your very own gas station. But Docked has us working in what is notoriously a dangerous field where we operate heavy machinery and move massive cargo containers from location to location. Here you are a longshoreman, and your job isn’t just about moving things and operating massive machines, as you’ll also need to be financially savvy while investing in your ports and growing the family business.

Let’s begin this review by saying DOCKED is NOT for everyone. Some of you may recall the forklifting minigame from the Shenmue series. Half of the players absolutely detested it, decrying it as mundane and boring. The rest found a strange satisfaction in moving about cargo and earning a fair wage. Personally, it felt like work to me, but I’m not here to judge. In that same way, DOCKED very much feels like work most of the time. Machines are slow, painstaking accuracy is required in aligning your spreader with the cargo container below it, and progression is a crawl across the game’s 15-20 hour playtime where you can only complete a set amount of jobs per day.

When starting DOCKED, you have two difficulty options to select from, standard and hard. The hard mode is the more realistic of the two choices, with tighter deadlines and greater precision required. The game is broken up into various jobs and does include a throwaway story about a hurricane, a struggling musician, and a family business. I’d tell you more, but time is precious and it really doesn’t matter. What does matter, however, is how the moment-to-moment gameplay plays out. Essentially, players will need to complete several jobs per day, which typically involve picking up containers and moving them somewhere else while trying not to damage the machinery or precious cargo. There is some variety to the vehicles that you’ll be operating, with more unlocked with, you guessed it, time and money.

In between jobs, you’ll sign orders, designate utilities, and spend money on upgrades while growing the operation further. Controlling machines is no easy task, as the game is riddled with button combinations that will have the less-than-patient tossing their controller. Some of the mechanics require holding multiple buttons at once, and true to reality, each machine handles as bulky as you would expect. This makes me feel a bit mixed about the gameplay. On one hand, the game gives you what’s advertised. I’ve never worked the docks myself, but it's hard to imagine that the experience presented here isn’t at least somewhat similar. And yet, a fun video game this does not always provide. It’s slow, monotonous, frustrating, and often repetitive, and yet, I see where it could also appeal to the right player.

The target audience for this game is people who love simulators and are enthusiastic about heavy machinery. Obviously, this exists, but I can’t imagine the center of that Venn diagram is very large. For everyone else, the frustrating and complex control schemes, slow movement, and the repetitive structure of gameplay will be a wonderful substitute for melatonin on a sleepless night. Unfortunately, I personally fell into the latter category. I’m not opposed to a well-crafted simulator, and DOCKED does deliver on what it promises, but this crane just couldn’t get its hooks in me. The biggest issue for me was just how boring it all felt. Maybe with a bit more drama in the storytelling, some greater visual interest, or quicker progression, I could get on board with some of its less-than-thrilling mechanics. Players are able to exit vehicles and walk around from the first-person perspective, but DOCKED never does a whole lot interesting with this. In fact, when you exit a vehicle, you’ll lose sight of the game’s important waypoints.

To its credit, DOCKED does a nice job of explaining things most of the time, and in some instances overexplains, rehashing your directives step-by-step at the beginning of each job. Your goals also remain on the screen as long as you need them to, and you can keep a handy cheat sheet on the left side to see the many controls for each vehicle, though it is a bit intrusive and can impede your view of your waypoints. Still, there’s a lot of content here with plenty of new vehicles to unlock that do all feel uniquely different from one another, though most of them ultimately perform the same main task. Perhaps most importantly though, you can literally toot your own horn, which is kind of fun.

At the end of each day of work, players will get results, which is a summary of everything you’ve done and where the business stands. From there, it's back to doing jobs, managing the economy, unlocking things, and achieving milestones. The vast majority of your time will be spent on jobs, so some of the other elements feel more tacked on by comparison, especially the story. But on the topic of presentation, DOCKED doesn’t look particularly great, so I’m going to have to dock a few points for style. The vehicles are pretty accurate to what my untrained eyes would expect, but each work area feels lifeless and empty in comparison. Character portrait art is rather uninspired, as is much of the signage around the different locations.

There are some okay water and light visuals, and some decent sound effects too, but the generic radio tracks that are selectable are aggressively boring, reminding me of AI-generated or copyright-free music. I’m not pointing any fingers, but it does give off that sort of soulless vibe. Thankfully, you can swap tracks and even turn off the radio entirely, leaving you to your thoughts about cargo. The same can be said for the voice performances, which are stilted and lacking any real humanity or emotion. The game ran well, however, on PC, though at the time of this review I was unable to test the Steam Deck version. The only major bug that I came across was my controller moving of its own free will on menus. A day 1 patch is to be deployed, so perhaps most of the smaller snags I came across during gameplay won’t be an issue for you.

While the right kind of person could find some entertainment value in playing DOCKED, I feel the vast majority of people who play video games will find it to be a bit too slow and monotonous to get any real entertainment value from it. While I appreciate its attention to detail in being a realistic simulation, I just didn’t find it all that fun to play. There’s plenty to do here for those that do get on with the gameplay, and I think former dock workers in particular will get a kick out of it, but if you're more of a casual fan of simulators or looking for a relaxing game to unwind with, this one may not do the trick. DOCKED is a functional but unfun product that will only appeal to a niche audience. It’s a crane game without even the illusion of a prize at the end.

TABLE LAMP: MEDIOCRE