Recent reviews by SirReldar

very fun survivor

its good, play it

Unfortunately, broken beyond playability.

Joining a server currently spawns you under the map and in becomes impossible to interact with the game anymore, requiring ALT+F4. The Discord is full of dozens of people with this same issue, so I know its not a "me" thing. Devs have not responded to my inquires, but a mod assured me the issue is being diligently worked, despite complaints of this problem going back for 3 MONTHS now. A dev responded to one of the earlier complaints from someone else with this problem, and said he would try "rebooting the server". Here we are months later and the game is still unplayable.

I am more than understanding of the early access model, but I expect at least rudimentary playability. A game breaking bug that causes literal unplayability should be backed out immediately or made TOP priority for fixing. Right now they are selling a functioning main menu.

its good

tons of fun. worth every penny.

the demo gives a good feel for the game

its fun

its great

*EDIT* Game appears abandoned by the devs. Playerbase is almost non-existent. Would have been an awesome game if the devs would have stuck to it, but as of now, its just a scam.

Its an absolute blast. Total chaos. I feel like Red 5 when I am chasing someone through a trench. I can't wait to dive into the drone customization. I took a quick look at it and it seems extremely involved!

**EDIT**
Unfortunately, I feel compelled to change my thumbs up to a thumbs down. At the moment, this game is straight up abandoned. There has been one patch since I originally reviewed this game almost 2 years ago, and that one patch was simply increasing ship hold space (i.e. changing some numbers). The Discord is basically dead. Someone will ask the devs if they have any news or updates and a week later get a simple "not right now, sorry" in response. It has been that way for several several months. Supposedly the publisher pulled their funding so devs are basically sitting on their hands waiting for a load of cash to fall out of the sky.

I still stand by my original review. The content that is there is a ton of fun. The gameplay and ship battles are rewarding and engaging. Unfortunately, you run out of new things to do and see very quickly and there's a few bugs that need working. If you are OK with that then I would still recommend the game, but only on super sale. The $20 price is only really justified on the merits of future promises, which at the moment seem to have no chance whatsoever of coming to fruition.

So, so much potential. But I cannot recommend a game that continues to promise big things when there is no evidence of it ever happening.

**Original**
I'm very confused on why this game is getting so much hate. Even in its unfinished state, this game is very, very good. Yes, it is unfinished. Yes, there are places that it shows.

Others have complained that the combat (naval and melee) felt "clunky", confusing, hard to control, etc. I feel like we played different games! Basically you can only aim your cannons horizontally by turning your ship (like in real life), and you manually aim them vertically with the mouse. Yes, this is somewhat tricky at first, but to me, it felt extremely rewarding and interesting once I got the hang of it. Different ammos will have different trajectories, making mid to long range shots quite tricky. Theres a cool mechanic where you can fire only a single cannon with a smoke trail so you can see just where your cannons will hit, then when you are happy, "fire for effect" the whole salvo. Its really quite fun and engaging.

As for melee combat, again, not sure where these "clunky" complaints are coming from. I thought it felt quite smooth and responsive. Theres not much "special" going on. Left click to hit, right click to parry, tab to switch to musket with (which is extremely inaccurate and has about a 10 second reload time, again, like in real life). It feels somewhat like Outward to me. Nothing great going on here, but no real complains either.

The music! Holy balls! GREAT background music. Its a mostly acoustic guitar which is a nice change up from "Arghhhh, shiver me timbers" pirate music.

The ship building/customization seems really cool. I haven't gotten really into it yet, but your ship is almost like a floating base. You can have workshops to produce weapons, make gunpowder, desalinate sea water, etc. Then you allocate crew based on their skills to the different positions on the ship. You can move crew freely, so if I am suddenly getting chased by pirates, I can move some crew out of a workshop and onto the sails or engine room to boost speed.

The graphics on the world map are not "amazing" but definitely not ugly. In locations (towns, battles, etc) the graphics are somewhat better, but still not AAA.

Some cons:
-You cant rebind keys!! This is (for me) the biggest con. Luckily, the defined keys are pretty intuitive, so even if I could, I'm not sure that I would. But this is very basic functionality that I cant imagine missing from any game, even early access.

-There's no way to inspect a ship before you commit to attacking it. So its kind of a crapshoot what you are up against. This is easily worked around by savescumming, but it would be nice if there was some UI element that showed even an estimate of crew size and armament size/type.

-The trading menu takes some getting used to. Its kind of confusing at first.

-Some areas of the game are just unfinished. For example, losing a battle when attacking a town gives a textbox of "your ship is overrun by pirates... etc" even though I was the pirates, on land, getting overrun by citizens. Things like that.

-The in game "encounter" where they basically asked for a positive review was just... cringy. Don't do that. Major faux pas.

-I feel like the ship hold sizes need balancing. By the time you have a good stockpile of food, water, gunpowder, cannonballs, i.e. the necessities to survive, theres not much room left for quests or trading. Granted, I have only had 3 different ships, so the other ships may not be like this.

Overall, a very fun game that I will most definitely be getting in to. Its not perfect, and its a bit light on content, but whats there seems really, really fun to me. Don't expect a huge involved storyline or custom character progression. This game is very much like Kenshi or Mount and Blade where you make your own story. There are missions and things from NPCs if you get bored, but no continuous story line yet. Furthermore, there is no "main" character. You play as the captain, and if you die, your dead. You get a message along the lines of "the first mate has been promoted to capitain" and then continue playing as him/her. A bit like Kenshi: just because your "first/main" character dies, doesnt mean your ships story ends.

I would recommend it. I'm really looking forward to playing more.

It has all the things every other survival/crafting games have. Pretty run of the mill in that regard.

However, it has a few things that not many other survival/crafting games have. For one, an actual "story". Now, the story isn't just given to you. It has to be completely discovered through the notes and journals you pick up. There is a terrible secret of the peninsula, that you can spend as much or as little time as you want learning.

Second, this game not only has an ending, but multiple endings. You are not surviving just for the sake of surviving, you actually have a goal, and a choice you make will drastically affect the ending. There's at least 2, maybe more. I'm hesitant to look that up yet, trying to stay spoiler free.

Third, this game is actually scary. I've played plenty of survival/horror games, but this one had lots of really creepy stuff. It was pretty "cheap scare"-free, just really really creepy stuff as you learn the truth about the peninsula. The first ending that I got made me genuinely sad and uneasy.

All in all, I would highly recommend it. On the surface, it looks like a pretty average survival/crafter: skin animals, chop trees, craft a bow, don't eat poison berries, etc. But if you look a little deeper, you will be rewarded with a compelling and emotional story and some great horror atmosphere.