Recent reviews by hampebampe

This game is a unique RTS game where instead of crushing your opponents with armies you crush them with boat loads of money! You might be sceptical at this and think this will make the gameplay lack complexity and make it numb and boring, and this was a sentiment I held until I've played for a few hours and started understanding the complexity of the game.

While the resource amasing in most RTS games is secondary to the warfare aspect and hence simple and mostly automated, this game revovles around its resource system and it works better than I first thought. The reason for this is that there's a dynamic resource market that's central in the game; simply put, if all players harvest iron and aluminum and other metals, the prices of these will drop and further harvesting becomes pointless. If that's the case you want to be the guy that's harvesting the precious food, oxygen and water, and making big $$ while buying the cheap resources the other players conveniently has overproduced. You're a daytrader, buy what's cheap and produce and sell what's expensive. This also means that adapting quickly is the key, and given that's it's played in real time it reminds me more of a high-octane game like starcraft than say the relaxing civilization series.

In essence there's an ever ongoing interaction with the other players that you don't see as clearly in war based RTS, where it's all about big clashes between the armies and each player does their own thing in the rest of the time. This interaction makes the multiplayer games super fun, while the play vs the A.I. ("quick play" and there's some sort of simplified campaign at the moment) is not quite as entertaining but still works well. A comparison with board games like Risk is fitting, and it is perfectly suited for LAN's.

There's some additional strategical elements to the game that adds depth; there are ways to sabotage an opponent and there's four different "classes" to choose from, a you should make depending on your strategy and the map.

It is, however, what I consider to be on the expensive side for a game of this dimension. With some more work done on the campaign, and a proper tutorial (the one in place now doesn't teach you very much), it would be reasonable though, and given that it's in early access maybe that's what will happen.

Beware: This game isn't for most people. I bought it upon a recommendation from a friend (don't worry, we're still friends) while simultaneously trying out the related browser based game "Fallen London". The gameplay looked kinda neat and relaxed, which was what I wanted at the time, and I liked the look of the graphics.

While I can't complain about the graphics, it's the gameplay that turns me off. While you are captaining a ship, this navigation aspect of the game is secondary to the text based gameplay which the game mainly consist of. There's tons of reading, and if you're the kind of guy that's used to quickly skim through texts while playing you shouldn't buy this game. I mean it, only buy this game if you got book worm tendencies (nothing negative about it) and this wonky kind of steampunk universe is appealing to you.

Sure, there's some fighting sea monsters going on, but that part is so simplified that it's just something you need to get over with. You need to manage your fuel/supply economy while navigating the sea but that's about it and it's just not very fun. Simply put, the game lacks complexity apart from the text based stories.

My recommendation is to try out fallen London first (it's free, google it), and if you like that type of game then you might wanna try out sunless sea. If you're like me however, and abadon your fallen london account after two days, then this game is a waste of your money.