This and a boatload of other games on GOG does not run out of the box on Ubuntu 64 bit. Its false advertisement. Its true you can make some of the games work after hours of tweaking, but if i pay for a port i expect it to run. If i wanted to spent hours on config - i would port the games my self.
Visuals and sounds are pretty good and the game has a good deal of high quality lore. Unfortunately the game designers have confused the words "time" and "challenge". The amount of grinding and boredom necessary to progress in this game suck out all the potential and leaves you with just-another-mobile-type-game/timesink. And in case anybody are wondering: its NOT a rogue like - the world is not dynamic and will not change on new play throughs. And despite the permanent death mode - its not really difficult. You can get by most of the time without being particularly careful - and suddenly be teleported to some obscene location with no supplies. Whoops - restart the grind. Some specific problems with this title are: 1. Movement of your ship is slow as hell. Travelling takes forever - and it does only get marginally faster with upgrades. And its not making it any better that the upgrades takes days (yes real days) of grinding to finance. 2. The user interface is clunky at times and most story options do not have hotkeys (big issue when the game is a grind). 3. Quest / tasks are scarcely documented and essential information is often not available (in the Journal) after the quest dialog is closed. 4. The combat system is MMORPG like with a sh..-ton of HP and low damage. The first kill of any enemy type is interesting - after that its you and the eternal grind. Damaged? There goes the spoils to finance the repair. 5. Perma-death (lineage or not) combined with grinding is just a horrible design decision. 6. Most of the game world is just dark water under the boat - nothing interesting is going on. Conclusion: This game has potential - but i get the feeling that instead of trying to make the game fun and punishing they settled for dull and punishing. What surprises me the most are the lack of microtransactions - i mean why make the game a mindless grind if not to profit on the players frustrations...? Don't buy it in its current state.
This games takes the concept of basic flash survival games and blends it with a rougelike - implements it with a potato cannon. The first 10 in-game days of the game are strong with ambience and immersion. Then it turns into a senseless grinding nightmare. Click on something - wait for the person to go there - choose what to do - wait for the person to finish the task. Rinse and repeat every day. Admittedly, the scavenging missions are quite engaging - until you realise its basically a lottery. Are the hospital staff going to murder you for no reason? Is the scavenger going to pull the trigger when you click the mouse - or take a coffee break first. The map is random generated? Well, the same 20 so locations appear in slightly different order and not always. Having a really good scavenge run? - game crashes - start over. If you have plenty of time, love immersive stories about how people kill themselves after surviving an armed assault, you love chopping wood and cooking stew (again and again). If you love waving the flag of "suspension of disbelief" (again and again). Conclusion: This game is like Bilbo: butter scraped over too much bread. Although the does not have micro-transactions like farmville its basically in black and white(NB: Farmville is in colors) and the price is pretty significant compared to the flash games it imitates (NB: the are free).
