TL;DR SUMMARY: Game is easily a pass; which pains me to say as I typically love anything having to do with nautical, naval, sea, sailing, etc. (Thank God I got it in a Humble Bundle!) There's three main mechanics to the game: 1. Sail, explore, and pick up items as you find them, 2. Attack and have combat with enemy vessels, 3. Dock at ports via a menu where you get supplies/quests --TL;DR SUMMARY: Game is easily a pass; which pains me to say as I typically love anything having to do with nautical, naval, sea, sailing, etc. (Thank God I got it in a Humble Bundle!) There's three main mechanics to the game: 1. Sail, explore, and pick up items as you find them, 2. Attack and have combat with enemy vessels, 3. Dock at ports via a menu where you get supplies/quests -- wash/rinse/repeat those three mechanics endlessly throughout the entire game on "procedurally-generated" maps. (At least you can also customize the factions/ships, as well as the map layout I guess... fourth mechanic!? LOL.)
Anywho, after perusing around on the webs a bit... seems some devs have "inspiration" (as a developer so eliquently phrased it on the Steam forums) from older shut-down titles/creations to then take said material, roll it around a bit, and rerelease it as their own... sad in a way... to have the ability and opportunity to make something unique and make the most out of the platform/foundation, and instead recycle something that's been done and shut-down numerous times before. :-|
REVIEW: Not to be mean, game has some promise and potential, but it just got so boring with only sailing all the time and ship-combat aside from some (sarcasm) rousing menu-simulator going on.
Having enjoyed the ship-combat in PotBS and AC: Black Flag, decided to give this a whirl... with a focus on just sailing and ship-battles, how could one go wrong.
Well, that's where it begins to massively unravel. Game is okay, customization and configuration at the beginning of factions, and color-schemes, etc is really neat... but when the game starts and you play for awhile, it's the classic wide as an ocean, but deep as a puddle dilemma.
It's another of many "pop up menu at the docks" sailing games with a locked isometric-view, where you're constantly staring down at your ship with no means to zoom it in whatsoever, so the view you start with is all you constantly have the entire game (an ability to pan in behind the ship and have more of a graphical 3D view would be awesome!), with nothing but constantly seeing the water and the ship, which might be okay. But then you just constantly sail, gather, quest (which quests you get at docks and they get put in your cargo-hold like inventory... for some that makes sense, but others not so much), grind, combat, etc. If this released many moons ago on say the NES, SNES, or even the Gamecube, or even early Playstation 1 or 2, might not have been so bad as a quick time-waster console-game... but this is a PC game, that only released 2 years ago in 2015.
It's almost more of a clicker kind of game... since when you come across pirates or enemies, your ship will auto-fire at it and all you really need to do is circle it and watch the battle commence. I was trying my hardest not to doze off while playing this, and I honestly wasn't tired when I originally started playing it... and even more bluntly honest, I wanted it to be much more fun than that! -_-
I'm gonna' have to shelf this again... because if all I did in this the entire time is JUST ship sailing constantly and auto-combat and grinding... I might find myself burned out on other games such as PotBS, etc... which is a shame... was hoping this would be a fun "filler" kind of game when on a cool-down from PotBS and such... oh well, I guess... considering the state of today's gaming-industry, guess I shouldn't be all that shocked. Even if it were more of a pleasure-cruise exploration, there's so much more that could be done and/or added to make it more fulfilling as such. Perhaps allow people to get off on land and piers/town and walk around with a top-down old-school pixelated character (think Dragon Warrior or original Ultima and/or Final Fantasy) that can explore around, dig for treasure, fish, etc... perhaps even build/upgrade a house and/or your faction's village.
Another thing that I found bizarre, is even though it allowed me to customize SIX factions, which I tried to make really unique and interesting, even on the largest map (33x33), it would only allow me to place FOUR factions!? What happened to the other 2 that I customized!? -_-… Expand
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