I'd like to say what I like about this game, but at present I'm mainly annoyed and frustrated with it (and GOG won't stop pestering to rate it). It runs like absolute garbage. Even with v-sync off, it makes my laptop run so hot I can't actually touch it, and the frames bottom out to like 1/second. The challenge difference between medium and hard difficulty is absurd. It goes from baby-game easy to obtusely restrictive, and just plain not fun. Even now it's still riddled with bugs and poor optimiztion. Don't buy it unless the devs actually start fixing things and/or it's on sale. I would give it 2 stars but I'm trying to show that I have enjoyed playing it, mostly.
On start I initially did try to explore but found that the starting constraints were to severe to get very far before being stranded. If you run out of fuel within boatlength of a port the game still acts like you're miles from shore. I found that there was a realatively easy way to grind for resources but after a few rounds is presented me with a mission to bring to the goods to the other end of the map, which I accidentally accepted and couldn't back out of. I died trying to get there and restarted inheriting the upgraded house, but then a UI flaw caused me to just restart entirely. If you buy a trade good and you hold is too full there's no way to simply cancel the trade. You have to dump cargo which basically dooms your whole effort to upgrade. Upon restarting I found that port I needed to grind had respawned unacceptably far from London, so I just kept restarting until put it back where I wanted it. Then I discovered that my decision to skip character creation couldn't simply be revisted later. This cost me resources, which made the grind that much more difficult, which made me stop playing. I may pick it up again, but nothing good that I could say about this game would negate how frustraing the overall experience was.
