so fun so good but holy shit you'd think after 3 years they'd have figured out how to make the UI not utter dogshit
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This game breaks my heart like no other. The core systems work well enough, and there are plenty of cute small mechanics that would be enough to stand out. But there is just simply not enough things in it, for a multiplayer game you run out of things to do almost comically fast.
Sailing is wonderful, and is a really fun mechanic for travelling with your online friends. Everyone almost always has something to do on the ship, from adjusting sails to just looking around for other players and islands. The sea is beautiful in this game, and the waves frequently grow large enough where its impossible to see anything on the deck. Keeping everything running requires good communication, which I think is generally all a game like this would need. This also makes sea battles great, there are lot of decisions you need to make while fighting another ship, and everyone needs to be on the same page to do so. Can't remember the last time where anything made me and my group as hyped in an online game, as dropping the anchor to do a 180 and straight up ram the ship following us, jumping on their deck and slaying their confused crew as we hit them.
There is a really cute small mechanic in this game that I think should be remembered forever. All players have 3 instruments in their tool set, and activating them silences the in-game music to play one of several little tunes. The great part is, all instruments have a lead and a rhythm section to them, whoever started playing will play the lead, and everyone else plays the rhythm part. If the lead player lets go of the action button, a rhythm player will switch to playing the lead. We found ourselves always playing the same song when we were sailing home at the end of a session, passing the lead between several instruments. It's a really tiny thing that doesn't really do anything mechanically, yet it adds so much to the game.
There are two types of content in the game to do: randomly generated side quests, and tall tales, which are basically the story missions. The randomly generated content is cute at first with its riddles and treasure maps, but it starts to get boring real fast. Doing one mission of each faction practically shows you every type of mission you could get, there is little reason to keep going with them. There are random sea events to spike things up, storms that makes it almost impossible to navigate in them, sharks larger than your ship and a kraken. These do add some much needed variation to the game, and are good fun when they appear in a sea battle with another player. This really showcases the potential this game has as a story generator, we would have other ships turn up to help us defeat the kraken, or sometimes we'd circle around newer players, to help them fight a shark, but the lack of variety, and the fact that only one of these events can happen at a time quickly make these just everyday occurrences. The story missions on the other hand are abysmal. Set pieces are frequently reused, to the point that the same puzzle room reappears in almost all missions, and all boss fights have the same moveset. The riddles that connect these parts together are wonderful, but the aforementioned boss fights are probably the worst I have ever experienced in a video game. Their attacks revolve around either spawning adds, or pushing you really far away from them, so in practice most of the fight will be spent running back and forth, spamming your attack button, and then repeat when he says the funny explosion line again. And oh god are they the spongiest bullet sponges I have ever experienced. I'd like to add to the record that the group I played with are all people who did FFXIV savage raids, we are all really used to long fights against one thing, yet the hardcore content in an MMORPG felt short compared to these. I am not exaggerating when I say that these fights were all 10-20 minutes long, without any second phases, enraged attacks, or anything. Just the wailing and running. These fights are detrimental to this game, and straight up removing them would increase the enjoyment of these missions tenfold.
Progression in this game is basically nonexistent, which is a blessing and a curse at the same time. There are no upgrades, extra tools, ships, or anything, the only use you have for money in the game is for cosmetics, which you can reasonably grind out in a 2-3 hour session with side quests. There are a few cosmetics that are locked behind either achievements or your faction standing, most of these would require a long term investment in the game, but I find it highly unlikely anyone would do this. There are no repercussions for anything. Fell off the ship? Oh don't worry, a mermaid will appear to save before the sea could do any harm. Died? Respawn on your ship in roughly 20 seconds. Your ship sank? That's okay you just get a new one and the game just puts you on a safe island. These two things are ultimately what brings this game down. There are really no risks in the game, the only reason you would not engage in a battle is because you are bored already and want to be done with whatever you are doing.
In the end, despite all of its flaws, I would still recommend this game to try out if you have a group of online friends that you play a lot of different games with. Sure anything is fun with friends, but this is one of the rare cases, where a game was designed to be enjoyed with friends from the ground up.
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