Sea Dogs

The story sounds interesting. But since there is no manual, readme or any other help, it's no fun finding out how the game actually works.

This is 1st game where there is no way to see how much damage the enemy is taking. I spent half 1 hour in a a sea battle asking to myself: "I'm at least hitting it?", "Who's wiining?"... Rubbish.

You want to know why this game sucks? Well, thereby hangs a tail. I have never researched the development background but my intuition from playing the game is that there were very talented and desirable people involved on creating this title, however, nearly nearly every decision made at every step in production was ultimately unfortunate. The background story and intro very standard but perhaps a little better than average. If you've ever encountered pirate content of any kind you're familiar. Broad appeal was surely the goal and they were successful for what that's worth. The rolling waves and pitching deck of the ship were thrilling. The details of cannons and gunnery were interesting and had the sparkle of authenticity. There was a learning curve that was respectable. However, once mastered, all those seemingly desirable highlights were so much useless weight on a very banal offering. In the long run all the impressive advances brought by the 3d presentation were meaningless decoration. Eventually you would realize that the much more effective method of play was to use the 2d mini map rather than first person, skipping ahead to relevant momenta rather than slog through the nightmare of sailing simulation, and autofire your cannons with the spacebar rather that aim in first person. Everything that was supposed to add value was dead weight using far more resources on your pc than was necessary or appropriate. At the core there was almost nothing about this game that wasn't done roughly equally well by literally every other pirate game ever. The only novelty that stuck out in my mind was really nothing to write home about. What if steamship, essentially. An exponentially superior game of the era and genre that is a better investment of your time is called (I believe) Sid Meier's pirates. A couple years newer of I remember right and worthy of praise.

Sea Dogs is... bad. I can't think of any better way to summarize. The core engine/game is pretty well constructed. It is an open world game where you can buy and sell ships as well as cargo, engage in sea battles, walk around town, and sail to different ports. The game takes place during the golden age of piracy in what looks to be a fictional Caribbean. The problem with this game isn't the outdated game mechanics or anything like that. It's the completely abysmal game design decisions and technical failures that push it that make it unplayable in the 2020's. There is never any indication of what you are supposed to be doing or where to go. This is sad because there is a main quest-line, and the only tool to help you follow it is a very vague quest log. The sea combat is the strong combat but boarding is horrible. It uses the outdated Sid Meier's Pirates combat system (literally ripped it off) where your health/damage is based on how many crew members you have, and all you have to do is stand in one spot and hit one of 2 sets of keys (swing and guard). The story is uninteresting and told in nothing but text blocks. As for it's technical failures, any resolution above the default 640x480 begins to get cut off in the dialogue window. Yikes! As for the positives, uhhhh... well the ship combat is fun. It can be a little slow and luckily there is a turbo function, but it is pretty fair, very tactical, and somewhat Arcade-y. Unfortunately, I can't recommend this title to anyone.