The complexity of the marine environment and the strong nonlinear loads of weapon attacks make it difficult for ship structures made of conventional materials to meet the comprehensive design requirements for safety, stealth, lightweight, comfortability, etc., while the artificial designability and performance hypersynthesis of metamaterials have made them an effective way to solve the above engineering requirements. Starting with applied research, this paper summarizes the theoretical and application research status of metamaterials in ship engineering over the past ten years, focusing on such aspects of mechanical metamaterials and acoustic metamaterials (AMMs）as their lightweight, vibration and noise reduction, and anti-blast and anti-shock properties, as well as research progress on design methods and applications. The large-scale, high-efficiency and low-cost manufacturing technology of marine metamaterials is the direction to follow and the bottleneck to break through in the future engineering application of marine metamaterials. The high load-carrying capacity and wide-band/low-frequency bandgap design of marine metamaterials have become potential research hotspots.