You know it's bad when Germans call your simulator boring (in the reviews). TransOcean fails in a rather bizarre way;

Docking mini-game

Every time a ship docks or undocks you can either play a boring, time-consuming mini-game or have the computer do this automatically for a prohibitively high fee (€100.000 per level of ship type). Obviously, this mini-game is supposed to be a selling point: "See harbours in 3D, be a captain". They wasted a whole bunch of money on 3D models of ports and ships.

In reality the mini-game gets tedious even when you have just a single ship. You have to do this twice for every single stop, and you make a lot of those. And if you don't you get penalised for no good reason. What's worse is that this hurts the game. Normally in a trading game you try to take on as much cargo as you can, going from port to port to load and unload it. Here you don't, because it costs a ridiculous amount of money or time. And you can't even see available contracts without a ship in port so that's no way around it. On top of that, while different ports have different "parking" fees, the cost of tugging (auto-docking) is always the same. This just makes no sense.

To give you an indication of how bad the mini-game is: Other ships just move right into your path and stop there for no reason. Even if you reverse and allow them to leave they just sit there to spite you. I got so annoyed i just rammed one of them and switched to automatic docking from that point on.

Babysitting ships

Now normally in a trading game or a simulation, there is a degree of automation. You can set up a trade route, assign transports and let the game handle the busywork. Not here. Even if you use automatic docking (and you will), you still have to click "dock" for every ship arriving somewhere. And even if you have a company contract, you still have to load goods manually for every ship and manually send them on their way. Buying fuel is also done manually, of course.

This is boring and makes it feel like a chore, even for a simulation. There's a space-fighting simulator called X3: Terran Conflict and even there you can automate trading ships. A game about shooting enemies in space has a better trading system, let that sink in for a moment.

Goods system

There are two things that make trading contracts annoying. First of all, companies often split up contracts randomly with different payouts assigned randomly - for the same good and destination! Think about how unlogical this is. They want to get their goods shipped as fast as possible, so why wouldn't they let you take on as many as you can instead of arbitrarily splitting them in different contracts?

Another terrible design choice is that when you unlock level 2 ships, the amount of basic contracts is reduced. Level 2 ships can be upgraded to carry fragile/dangerous cargo, but level 1 ships can't. There's no reason for basic contracts to disappear, companies still have to ship those goods.

User interface

In simulators most of your time is spent in menus, so you want those to be solid. They're not. If you're buying fuel, you can't quickly compare local fuel prices to other ports. You have to go back to the world map, click Fuel Prices and then select the continent. And when you're buying fuel or repairing a ship, the amount is selected using a scrollbar. There's no box where you can type in the desired amount, you have to try and drag this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ bar to roughly the amount you want (it's imprecise).

Contracts are listed in a window (look at the 4th screenshot at the top) with a scrollbar... in another window. Some of the information is only shown when hovering over contracts (fuel use). It's just a bizarre choice to hide core information that you constantly have to access in a window in another window. Oh, and if you have a company contract, of course it's not shown in the same menu, you have to go to Company Contracts and click on Accepted Contracts.

When you cast off your ship in the same menu, you have to pick your destination on a tiny tiny map that doesn't allow you to zoom in properly. At the start of the game this works fine because you only operate in Europe, but when you unlock level 2 ships the map is permanently zoomed out. I just don't understand why they won't allow you to zoom back in.

Conclusion

TransOcean is mostly a bunch of tedious fiddling in tiny menus. It punishes you for not playing a terrible mini-game, hides information, lacks depth and overall just fails to be engaging.