- Joined
- Nov 22, 2020
- Messages
- 2,203
I played the Steam demo, here are my impressions:
- The ship control/crew management systems are fairly simplistic (there are several job types on the ship to which you can assign sailors who carry them more or less well depending on their stats), but functional (you control the sails, guns and anchor, there are also supporting activities including crafting, cooking, repairing and cleaning) and easy to get into
- The sailors can die in accidents (guess there are skill checks while doing their jobs on the ship) and level up (you can select skills/specialisations for them, they also have traits like “coward” or “scholar”) and get fatigued (you can order them to rest and provide them with various types of food which improve resting), sick and demoralised over time and due to various events (all these problems can be countered by providing grog and medicines if you have them)
- You can manoeuvre the ship using A and D keys both while sailing and in combat (the demo doesn’t have boarding, you automatically loot the ship and can recruit the survivors of defeated crew), there is no separate combat minigame, you simply manoeuvre the ship close to the enemy and exchange fire (there are the usual ammo types of ball, ball with chains against the sails and grape)
- The shore expeditions are a separate CYOA minigame, you select the away team (skills and equipment come into play here) and then choose a path through the area, each step on the way contains some possibilities (scavenging, hunting, combat etc) which can be used through skill checks
- Your character can choose several backgrounds and also gets to level up and pick up various perks
Generally the game is OK (its certainly no Star Traders: Frontiers in terms of complexity, nor no Man-of-War in terms of ship combat), the question is how much actual content is there going to be, since while the systems are solid, I can see the gameplay loop getting old pretty fast unless there are lots of interesting quests to do. But this being an EA tittle I guess it wont hurt to wait a few months before dropping any cash on this.
- The ship control/crew management systems are fairly simplistic (there are several job types on the ship to which you can assign sailors who carry them more or less well depending on their stats), but functional (you control the sails, guns and anchor, there are also supporting activities including crafting, cooking, repairing and cleaning) and easy to get into
- The sailors can die in accidents (guess there are skill checks while doing their jobs on the ship) and level up (you can select skills/specialisations for them, they also have traits like “coward” or “scholar”) and get fatigued (you can order them to rest and provide them with various types of food which improve resting), sick and demoralised over time and due to various events (all these problems can be countered by providing grog and medicines if you have them)
- You can manoeuvre the ship using A and D keys both while sailing and in combat (the demo doesn’t have boarding, you automatically loot the ship and can recruit the survivors of defeated crew), there is no separate combat minigame, you simply manoeuvre the ship close to the enemy and exchange fire (there are the usual ammo types of ball, ball with chains against the sails and grape)
- The shore expeditions are a separate CYOA minigame, you select the away team (skills and equipment come into play here) and then choose a path through the area, each step on the way contains some possibilities (scavenging, hunting, combat etc) which can be used through skill checks
- Your character can choose several backgrounds and also gets to level up and pick up various perks
Generally the game is OK (its certainly no Star Traders: Frontiers in terms of complexity, nor no Man-of-War in terms of ship combat), the question is how much actual content is there going to be, since while the systems are solid, I can see the gameplay loop getting old pretty fast unless there are lots of interesting quests to do. But this being an EA tittle I guess it wont hurt to wait a few months before dropping any cash on this.
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