TL;DR: Uncharted Waters Online: a very difficult game with countless opportunities that will keep you shackled to your screen for hours on end.

It had been a while since I first tried this game with a steep (and I mean Steep with a capital S) learning curve, so a few weeks ago I reinstalled it, saw that my character, hardly advanced at anything, was still available so I figured I would start where I had left off.
That may have been a mistake, because apart from remembering how to move my character and how to get to my ship, I had no idea what I was doing. Starting from zero after having finished the tutorial… Bad choice.
But still, I struggled on and after a bit of trial and error I managed to set off on one of my first missions: the simple task – from the adventurer’s guild – to open up a trade route between Amsterdam and Calais.
Before setting sail I remembered, luckily, that my crew would need food and water, and after having purchased these few goods I set off.
Using the map (having forgotten that I had surveying skills), I finally managed to locate Calais and finish my first quest. Hooray!
In celebration I went to the market, bought some goods I thought would sell well in Amsterdam, set course for The Netherlands and… Yeah… the goods that I bought were useless there. The little money I had I spent on a product that Amsterdam had in abundance, meaning that if I would sell it anyway, I would lose money rather than make a profit.
Thankfully once I handed in my quest at the adventurer’s guild mediator I earned some money again so I didn’t hit rock bottom (yet?).

Long story short, I kept doing these quests for the adventurer’s guild, slowly rising in rank, slowly improving my skills, and bit by bit discovering more European cities. It wasn’t before long that, also with a better knowledge of which goods to buy, I regularly sailed from Amsterdam to London, Calais, Bergen, or even as far as Stockholm to open up trade routes, run errands for the market keeper, or any other well-paying quest that was thrown my way.
Buy cheap goods in Stockholm, sell them on the way in Copenhagen or Hamburg, buy cheap goods there to take to Amsterdam, sell them to the market keeper, hand in the quest at the guild, and Bob’s your uncle.

But honestly, who wants to stick around The Netherlands and the cold Scandinavian countries, if you have the possibility to sail to the sunny south? So after a little while (read: many, many hours) I managed to scrape together some money, put some in the bank, and set sail further south with the idea of reaching Seville which, I hoped, could become my new home base. A strategic location for if at some point I will have enough money to be able to buy an ocean-worthy ship with a large hold and a lot of sailors.

However, I don’t see that happening any time soon as I’m currently messing around the Mediterranean and north and west Africa, and I have absolutely still no idea what I’m doing, I don’t know how to get more inventory space, I don’t know what half the stuff in my inventory is for…
I’ll figure it out, though. I have to. Because even though this game is a tough one to play, I can’t seem to let it go. I must improve, I must get better, I must find new lands!
Don’t let the “mixed” reviews scare you off. If you’re into the Age of Discovery, fancy playing an MMORPG with literally the whole world to explore, choose whether to be an adventurer, trader, battle expert, pirate, or anything else you can think of: Give this game a good try, but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the learning curve!