Recent reviews by Symphatic

The entire franchise, one of my favs mind you, turned into a cash grab. Chromatic Games has gone down hill and is just begging to go under. None of the games in the franchise, especially this one, is worth the money nor time spent on it.

The game itself is really good, but there's an extremely terrible balancing issue. I usually play games on the hardest difficulty setting, but in some cities it's straight impossible to even play on Very Easy. First night there's 3 squads of infected, about 5 each. No big deal. On the 4th night there's about 7 squads with 10-15 infected. Yeeeaaahh..... how is anyone supposed to survive that...?

Other than the clear balancing issue this is a pretty solid game. Unfortunately, the balancing issue makes this hard to enjoy. It will be a Yes for recommended when the devs work on the balancing. Earlier the better please.

Aspyr is a joke company. They need to stop touching our childhood games, ruining them, then pricing them as if the game just came out for the first time ever.

All they ever do is: run everything through AI to enhance the graphics (excluding videos), introduce bugs that never existed in the original game (somehow), did zero compression, & somehow failed a multiplayer mode release without even trying to do in-house testing which really isn't hard to test. Pretty much everything they did was what modders (excluding introducing bugs) did, but in a terrible way.

The negative reviews are hilarious. These people don't even read patch notes. Man does more in one patch than most major companies do in several.

*sigh*... it pains me to do this as I love pirate games, but yet another game destroyed with bad development practices.

As a developer myself I decided to dig into your files to see why I am experiencing crashes, why the game is unresponsive, and the controls are overly difficult to use. Here's what I have got:

Firstly, the movement is terrible. You turn run on and you basically just... walking fast. It's not running. It's not jogging. It's just fast walking. Trying to hold, let's sat, W & D to move at a right forward angle doesn't work well. The camera is so horrendously disgusting it's not even funny. Who develops games these days, 3D Open World RPG games mind you, with forced cameras at absolutely stupid angles where you can't see anything you need and/or want to see...? It's like the developer hasn't realized technology has improved and is stuck in this Atari/PS1 mindset.

Also, seriously... no full screen windowed mode? Really?

Researching I realize this game is made after Sea Dogs series. Just because something is in the same series does not mean you need to keep the same exact development style from over 24 years ago. That does not mean you're making a quality game. You're actually doing the entire series a disservice by NOT improving your coding ability, art, or anything. How can you justify asking people to spend money on the full release when you essentially just ran the textures through AI and called it a day? There's no drastic improvement anywhere. There's no new engine. There's no new art. No new ideas.

File size, the amount of files, and how it's formatted is also incredibly questionable. You did good on the .WAV files for sounds as they're the most optimal. The .WMV movie is a nice thought, but it's an outdated video compression system. You could have shed off another 70-100mb using up-to-date video compression software. You do not need 52,000 files and 2,120 folders. Even FFX, which came out a year after Sea Dogs, only has 1,752 files and 21 folders (probably less since I modded it). An old Japanese MMORPG, SMT Imagine Online, which came out in 2007 has a similar file amount as yours but it has 1300 less folders and 16GB less, all while looking significantly better than this game and has significantly better controls. There is absolutely zero excuse for your file size and folder amount. You need to learn, as a company, how packaging/compression/decompression/etc. works. These are the absolute basics that you did not seem to want to learn and a company should know how to do.

When you learn how to do the above properly you'll be cutting that absurd amount of files down to a few hundred. That will also help you clean up the ridiculous amount of .ini files you seem to have that calls to thousands of different files when you could just call to the 1 packaged file.

Overall this an unoptimized PS1 to PC port which has almost no improvements over the 2000 Sea Dogs game. I do not recommend until the company goes back to school or at least looks at one of the millions of game development videos on YouTube that could solve pretty much every negative I said. You'll enjoy frequent crashes as well since, again, the optimization is really bad.

I miss this game :/

For everyone commenting "they're not gangsters" has absolutely never seen nor hung out with a gang-banger in their entire life. They're just like you or me. Some can be eccentric, some sadistic, but they're fundamentally normal. They just go by a different set of "rules".

There's also some dude that is complaining the game is short. Yeah, main story. How about doing all the side quests + DLC? 24 hours in and I just barely got to 1/3rd of the way done.

The game isn't sh*t. The community is.

I bought this just to pet Poogie.

Good.

I actually didn't get any of the DLC I paid for so I refunded it. They couldn't even get that right.