Recent reviews by 00Goat

TL:DR: Seemingly great game turns out to have a single OP "strategy" that makes it a total waste of time and money.

This game can be a ton of fun. You can play this game as intended. You can fire cannon balls, grapeshot, heated cannon balls, chain shot, you can grapple ships and board them, etc. Normally when the ship is hit you get a notification that there's a hole, and you have to repair it, which takes about 10 seconds of hammering.

Or you can abuse the bar shot.

With bar shot there's no notification that you've been hit. I'm told it takes about five hits to wreck the mast, and those don't actually have to be *aimed* at the mast, they just have to hit the ship. The result is that the mast now needs 38 rounds of repair and you can't just hammer continuously, you have to stop for each round. It appears this would take three or more solid minutes of repair to fix. Of course the ship is a sitting duck at this point and you won't have three minutes to work with.

Then your enemies can board you. If they grapple your ship it stops the ship from sinking, and it becomes a sort of FPS mini-game with a slowed down respawn time and a reward to the crew that wins it. Thing is they don't *have* to grapple you, they can just pull alongside and jump aboard. This gives the attacker a massive advantage because the defending crew is eventually spawning in water as the ship sinks and can't fire their weapons, nor can they board the attacking ship because it's too high up.

So yeah... four of us had an absolute blast the first night, and recruited another four or five friends to play, only to find out that there's no game, just one OP "strategy" that works every time. Most of the friends were able to refund it thankfully, but talk about a disappointment. Fix your game devs.

Steam needs a "Cannot recommend at this time" button for these early access titles.

The good:

- Metabolism is interesting and seems well thought out. You don't just start dying immediately when you haven't eaten like most games. The fact that nutrition is a matter of what you ate and not just if you ate has a lot of potential. Food variety seems endless, and should be sufficient to support what the metabolism info demands.

- Multiple layers of clothing with decent storage per layer makes it plausible to carry a good bit of material without being absurd like some other survival games. Is that a hunting scope in your short pants or are you just happy to see me?

The bad:

- Crafting is frustrating in many ways. Let's talk about rope, which is needed in virtually every major early recipe. One tree bark rope requires 5 long sticks, and the large bush is your only source of long sticks with your starting stone knife. One large bush might give you two long sticks, more likely one. *And you can't carry them on your person*. You can carry one long stick in your hands.

So basically you get to play fetch with long sticks. Get one, bring it back, go get another, make a pile somewhere, pray you can find the pile again. Strangely enough if you make a bundle of sticks you can holster them, but you can't do that with a single stick. You generally need multiple units of rope to make anything substantial.

Once you've crafted an object watch out because it won't go into your inventory even if there is space. This means you spend 20 minutes getting the materials for an axe only to discover that you're short a unit of rope because you forgot to pick it up off the ground after you made it. Extra expletives for forgetting to pick up the crafted axe itself, which essentially vanishes into the forest floor when you're 10 feet away.

I actually like the idea of utilizing materials in a radius around you, except that radius isn't big enough. When you unbundle five sticks to make rope one of the five ends up out of reach and you can't make the rope without doing a little jig to get the five items in range.

- Throwing melee items. Loot a town. Find a grand total of one item you can whack zombies with. Hit a zombie three times before throwing the baton off into the distance because apparently that happens if you hold down the attack button too long?

- Fighting stamina. 3 str, 3.5 con, medium melee fighting skill, 4 swings and you're exhausted. Would someone please bring the balancer over here?

- One of the dumbest concepts for a video game ever. Take a few books and movies, throw them in a blender, and add mechs. Ooh and zombies! Err, puppets, yeah, puppets!

News flash - a reanimated corpse has a name, it's called a zombie. This game is a pure day-z clone in so many ways, why make up such a hilariously bad excuse for cloning the zombies?

The deal-breaker:

No item persistence in single player except for your inventory. No shelter, no storage boxes, nothing. You can't build anything meaningful in single player, and you can't host your own server, so there's basically no way to simply explore what the game has to offer without joining a multiplayer server where your stuff can theoretically be stolen/destroyed.



EDIT:

To include a note to this developer and all developers. Try keeping in mind that you have at least two distinct audiences. One audience is "gamers". The other is filthy causals who would like to be able to swing a baseball bat while crouching, like a normal human actually could, for the sake of beating the one zombie who got in the door.

This is because some of us have jobs, and lives, and would just like a featherbed overview of the game, and will simply bail if our time is being wasted. At which point you still have our money, and we're not happy.