started playing this game and i was pleasently surprised with this one
in short
you can think of it as a Steampunk Sid Meiers Pirates game
without the fencing part when you board the ship
but not having that is no issue at all, it gets countered by the deep
customization system of your ships, trading system and even some base building
Pros:
Nice graphic style (Steampunk/Fantasy)
gameplay is intuitive and easy to understand
in depth ship customization
large trading system
basebuilding/upgrading to some extent too (not sure how far that goes yet)
cons:
at times characters seem to look "off"
not fully voice acted or the voice over bugs out
no other localization than english avaiable
All in all a really solid game and worth buying
We have here a fun little naval warfare game. Nothing too deep at first, although you do have to set up your own factories to make the better gear. It's fun sailing alongside an enemy and unloading a broadside at point-blank range or sending a swarm of wasps (rockets, not insects) from long range.
There's some nice wit in the writing. Some of the dialog is quite amusing. Even mission requirements can have humor - the gunnery officer's promotion is a mission that requires 20 beers to start. Well, I guess he got promoted so we gotta have a party...
Unfortunately this game needs to be optimized and fixed. It leaks memory somewhere like a screen door. After playing for a while I have to save, close the game, restart it and load. And although I have a graphics card well above the stated requirement, the bigger ships make battles a slideshow. When I tried a drone build my framerate dropped to a DECIMAL!
Here's hoping they keep tinkering with this game and get it running smoothly. Or... restate the required video card for running it.
The game is a reasonable attempt at a "ship combat and trading" game. What irks me are quality of life issues. For example, you find yourself cruising between ports at various distances. You can try and carry fuel for "cruise" mode to go quickly between them, or plod along at your regular speed. But you go through fuel so fast, that to carry enough to be worth using cruise mode for more than escaping (more on that later), you'd have no space for anything else. You can accelerate the game up to 10x speed, but to be useful, you'd need 20x speed to avoid the headaches.
Then there's the pirates that spring out of nowhere, everywhere, including forces much stronger than you. There's almost as many pirates willing to engage you as there are vessels that don't want to engage you. If you take down the pirates, they get stronger, so you are disincentivized to do so.
In combat, there are "riders" that are supposed to be little fighters, except they are so overpowered that a force that carries them can take out a far superior force, just by forcing you to spend all your effort trying to forcus on them -- except you can't select your own targets, it's whatever targets the computer picks for you.
Hey, maybe we should target the riders trying to flank us before they can. Nah, we should totally aim for that half-dead gunship that could barely touch us even if it was at full power.
As others have said, quests tend to be "go fetch", and the plot is thin at best, really barely enough to give an excuse for the fetch quest. Yes, some quests are "fetch this enemy and sink their ship.
Reasonable, but nothing astounding. Add quality of life features to make the game less irritating and I'd add a star.
Got this game, fortunately at a discount couple of days ago.
The graphics are very good but so is the strain on your hardware, after 20 minutes of play I could boil an egg on the plate next to my processor. As you can see this game is about flying a boat in the world loosely resembling the 19th century in Europe. You have only two tutorials available, the fighting tutorial and the ship fitting tutorial. You will immediately notice problems even during the simplest screen manipulation. For example, moving your mouse while holding the right mouse button allows you to rotate the view, but the mouse cursor continues to move so you will soon hit the edge of the screen and to rotate your view further in this direction you need to release the right mouse button, return mouse cursor backwards, press the right mouse button again and then rotate the view until your cursor again hits the end of the screen. To achieve 360 degrees rotation you shall need to repeat this action several times. The user interface is very poor, in the first 30 minutes of the game I was scolded by my first officer a couple of times because I had chosen to fight instead of parleying with intercepting the boat, the truth was I was unable to find the parley option at all and I had to resort to the internet to get a clue. Actions in cities like purchasing stuff, and progressing a quest are similarly unintuitive. Even after several hours in the game, I was unable to judge how equipment available at stores compared to my current equipment and how they would affect my boat's performance. Ship combat also feels very poor even when compared to Sid Meir's Pirates Gold where wind strength and direction, ship size, damage, etc played a crucial role. Here tactics play a minor role, you shall have difficulty comparing enemy strength with yours etc. The story is very generic and traversing distances (through mostly notighness) takes a lot of time even when using time compression.
Beautiful game. I can't think of just a bunch of games that can beat or even match the graphics in this one and most of those come from AAA studios with multi-million USD budgets.
In terms of gameplay the game is just a very, very long string of fetch quests with a lot of time spent travelling from one place to the next and the ocasional ship battle that will see you crashing into you own escorts because you can't control them and both the AI and the pathfinding are terrible.
At the beginning I had a lot a fun outfitting the ships and fighting the ship battles but that got old fast. In the end I didn't have the patience to finish it. I was already skipping the dialogs by act 5 (out of 9 acts) and by act 6 I didn't care any more about anything. I just wanted to finish the quests as quickly as possible but in the end I couldn't even do that. Maybe in couple of years I'll give it another shot.
