Good grief this game is mediocre. I was really excited to play this, I'm not the best at CRPG games because I'm not much of a tabletop player, but I do like the open worlds and quests these games have. I've played many of the greats- Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights to name a few. Lets just address the elephant in the room. This game is bad. I'm suprised it is so highly regarded by some, but as my friend likes to joke "It's okay to be wrong". And I say that jokingly here too- I suppose some might like this but it definitely was not for me. The good things? The town designs. I really liked the modern grid-like cities that filled the game, one in particular feels pretty big compared to what I have experienced in other isometric CRPGS. But that is where the fun ends for me. So much is bad. The combat is outright broken. There is physical, magical, and technological paths to follow. Technological is an enormous handicap in the game. Guns are worse than swords. You can put all your points to spec into your stats instead of learning skills. The list goes on. The story is also really bad. You would think a steampunk game would have a really cool steampunk story right? Nope. You will visit Dwarves in mountains. You will visit Elves in trees. It's another high fantasy game with a touch of steampunk flavor to pull you in, but you soon realize the story is boring doesn't feel original at all. Lastly, there are bunch of terrible design choices that will piss you off. Two recent examples are a portion of the map you lose access to without warning- forcing you to abandon quests you picked up, and a "door" near the end of the game requiring an item that you should have held on to from the first area of the game. Don't have it? Sold it? Guess you will spend 10 hours grinding random encounters until an enemy drops one. Some people like the novelty of these kinds of games despite their flaws, but I impore you to look elsewhere for a good CRPG.
Akella is king when it comes to garbage. I am baffled that other people have left good reviews for this game. Lets start with a fact. Akella, the developer, went out of business. So it's obvious the games didn't sell well and for good reason. I'm the guy among my friend group that likes bad games. I accept most games good and bad because I have a love and appreciation for the ideas and experiments made in a product even if it fails to deliver them. I liked Mighty No. 9. I liked No Mans Sky. I liked Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5. Some games I can't stand but can accept they are a genre not for me. However, this is something else. It totes all of the exciting adventure elements of an open world AAA game. And yet, it fails miserably. Here is everything wrong with this game: - It recycled the assets and almost everything from the previous game (Caribbean Tales). You are basically paying for patches. Even even the towns are clones of each other WITHIN THE GAME. - There is no tutorial. It has a mess of a UI and the easiest difficulty is so punishing that if you mess up you might as well start a new game. Quests are often too vague to follow. - There is a quest where you get murdered. No joke, there is no way out of it. I wonder how that is supposed to be fun for the player. - In ship combat, you are forced to engage the enemy. You always spawn far enough apart that if you are chasing the enemy, you will never catch them. When the situation is reverse, the chase will go on forever, because they will never get far enough away to trigger the escape option. - You can easily kill one enemy in front of you but are easily killed when fighting two or more. WTF? - Prepare to sail from point A to point B repeatedly with no action for 20 or so hours. That is the amount of income you need to start anything interesting, like attacking ships. - Naval Combat/Movement is slow and the turbo mode is only 2x speed, which is still freaking slow. - You never have enough money ever.
If you think fetch quests are bad, wait until you play a game where all you have to do is sail from point A to point B.
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.
