Tempest

Played through the tutorial, which was interesting and fun. Decent ship, entertaining tasks and battles, then your ship gets sunk by a giant sea monster, although the latter is all part of the 'plot' so to speak. After gaining the knowledge of how the interface and basic mechanics of the game work, you then start the game proper with a simple ship, ready to set sail for your own adventures. All sounds very promising doesn't it? Well, that's where the fun ends. I don't mind games which are challenging. or in which even copious amounts of grinding is required, but when you invest countless hours of grinding, only to lose everything... That's neither fun or entertaining. Crew morale is affected by winning battles. The more battles you win, the higher morale stays. It's a pirate game, so that makes sense, but it presents a highly severe risk/reward challenge with your poor initial ship, equipment, and crew. You can trade too, but if you focus just on grinding trade routes to earn gold for upgrades, crew morale plummets. This means you're always forced to fight and take risks, and if/when you lose, you lose everything. If you're going to take risks, then of course, it helps to know what you're up against. In the map screen, you do have the choice of whether to engage in battles or not, but zero information about what you can expect to face. That only comes once you're actually engaged in the battle scene, by using a spyglass on a rival ship or defensive towers of a port. If you fancy your chances, you can fight. However, if you're heavily outmatched, the most sensible thing to do is flee, but at a big hit to crew morale. The biggest problem is there's just one perpetual and automatic save slot, and this is why if/when you lose, you lose everything... Including all the time you've invested in grinding, playing, progressing. You're back to square one, or restarting the game from scratch. That's not fun, it's just frustrating, and makes the whole thing seem pointless.

... and it can't make naval action engaging and fun. Everything is dull — the graphics, the combat, trading, etc. The game looks like it's a poor Android port (and I won't be surprised if it's actually true, even though I'm too lazy to check). The ships look terrible, there is nothing even close to real physics; sometimes your ship will simply dive in the waves, becoming completely covered by water (and then it will emerge back like nothing happened). Crewmen look like animated wooden manquins, they have no voice other than couple of repetitive screams when raising sails. Movement controls are bad, they're simply too responsive and you can't "feel" the ship you're controlling. Weird skill system where one type of skill completely blocks another: your ship can either be fast OR maneuverable, not both at the same time, even though skill points are so hard to asquire. Extremely boring boarding action, I can't believe someone managed to make such fun activity so bad. Only one type of crew can actually TRAVEL to enemy ship to slash them with a cutlass; as a result, boarding action is simply 2 ships standing close, while crewmen shoot each other. This, multiplied by enormous HP pools of crewmen, leads to extremely boring "minigame" which can last for as long as 10 MINUTES! And even if you clearly see you're going to lose, there is no option to surrender and skip the 10 minutes fight, you must either wait until all your crew dies, or Alt+F4 the game. There are some things I really liked (for example, the crew class system, where every type of crew from "Greenhand" to "Pirate" has some interesting abilities during boarding), but most of them are ruined by eveything else. Verdict: this game managed to make one of the most exciting parts of human history boring, repetitive and ugly. It's very unlikely that developers will manage to fix at least one out of three problems, so I don't recommend this game.

I'm a single player. To be fair this is one of the better games in the genre, with good amount of features, fun and semi-realistic battles, nice graphics, slow but engaging progress. It has much more sea battle details than Sid Mel's Pirates and Windward, while being more playable than Blood & Gold: Caribbean. Downside being the trader career not feasible, the game clearly started its design as a mobile game money-grabber, and personally I don't like the fake factions very much. However, it gets a 1 instead of 4, solely because the constant game-breaking bug. If you play campaign, once in a while the game crushes, and refuses to start again. You have to delete your save file to fix the problem. Because you only get one save slot, all your progress is lost during the process. It inevitably happens and is absolutely unacceptable. Practically you pay for a game and get a Demo.

Was recommended this as a good piratey romp after completing Black Sail. It sounds like a good game, but the main fact you quickly see is its a mobile game ported to PC. Menus tell you swipe across for instance which doesn't work for mouse. The menus are really hard to navigate using any method. Once you get into the game you have the overall map, much like SM Pirates, and it works ok. However its biggest failings is ship combat. The ship combat arena always seems to be the same sea and it can take minutes just to get to the enemy ships. Combat is slow and awkward and most of the time I couldnt tell who was an enemy or not. If you get it on sale for a couple of £, you may get some fun out of it. Unfortunately most of the elements have been done far better in other games, so can't recommend this to anyone.