- Highly enjoyable and engaging gameplay
- Creative and flexible shipbuilding
- Unfinished, buggy, and unplayable
- Clunky building mechanics
- Frustrating camera controls
- Poor game optimization
Emotions
Players experienced significant frustration due to numerous technical issues such as bugs, lag, poor optimization, and crashes, often rendering the game unplayable. Difficult and unintuitive controls, especially for camera and building mechanics, also contributed heavily to this emotion, alongside issues like lost progress and server connection problems.
Disappointment stemmed primarily from the game being perceived as unfinished, unpolished, or 'half-finished' with a lack of substantial content and updates. Players felt their high hopes were dashed by poor implementation, unplayable states, and a general lack of quality, particularly regarding physics and core gameplay loops.
Satisfaction was derived from the game's creative freedom, particularly in vehicle creation and the powerful editor, allowing players to build unique designs. Positive feedback also highlighted good optimization, realistic water physics, engaging level challenges, and the supportive efforts of the developers.
Hope was consistently expressed for future improvements, including bug fixes, optimization, and additional content. Players desired more accessories, better building systems, and continued developer support to enhance the game's overall quality and longevity.
Excitement was generated by the game's core concept of physics-based ship building and its potential for creative expression. Players were thrilled by the challenging gameplay, the open sea experience, and the high degree of freedom offered in designing and testing their creations.
Verdict
Mostly negative
Summary
Positive 47% · Negative 53%. Score: 53 / 100
Positives:
- Players generally find the game highly enjoyable, fun, and engaging, highlighting its potential and addictive gameplay. The overall impression is very positive, with many appreciating its creativity and diverse content.
- A core appeal of the game is its robust and flexible shipbuilding system, allowing players immense creative freedom to design various vehicles. This feature is central to the gameplay and highly praised for its depth and potential.
- The game's realistic and often humorous physics engine is a significant highlight, contributing to both the challenge and the fun of building and combat. It's considered a major selling point and a key feature of the game.
- The game offers a variety of fun and diverse game modes, including a campaign with numerous single-player levels that provide learning opportunities and competitive elements. This variety adds to the game's replayability.
- The Open World and Open Sea modes are highly praised for their exploration opportunities, stress-relieving sailing, and potential for expansion and conquest. These modes offer significant freedom and long-term engagement.
Negatives:
- Players report that the game feels unfinished and unpolished, with numerous bugs, especially in the tutorial and campaign, making it difficult to start or progress. Many describe it as being in an early access or beta state despite its official release.
- The ship-building mechanics are widely criticized for being inconvenient, clunky, and unintuitive. Issues include difficult camera angles, problematic auto-positioning of parts, limited component variety, and challenges in creating complex or enclosed designs.
- The camera controls are a major source of frustration, described as uncomfortable, illogical, and anti-human. Issues include the camera moving position when rotating and general difficulty in adjusting the view, making gameplay challenging.
- Connectivity issues, including inability to connect to servers and frequent crashes, are reported. Players also experience severe lag, especially in online play or when loading complex vehicles, impacting performance.
- The sandbox mode is frequently described as boring and lacking depth. Players note repetitive gameplay, limited ship roles, and the inability to disable enemies, which contributes to a dull solo experience.
Gameplay:
- The game is primarily a sandbox building game focused on naval combat and vehicle construction, drawing comparisons to titles like Minecraft, Scrap Mechanic, Trailmakers, and TerraTech, but with a unique emphasis on water physics.
- The game offers diverse modes including a structured single-player campaign with tutorials and challenges, online PvP and PvE (in testing), a creative mode, and an 'Open Sea' mode. Players unlock modules and earn currency through gameplay.
- Ship building requires patience and mastery of physics, particularly buoyancy, gravity, and center of mass. Players must consider these factors for ship balance and stability, with specific parts like pontoons simplifying some calculations.
- The 'Open Sea' mode is a PvE experience where players lead fleets, fight monsters and pirates in a semi-open world, and progress by defeating enemies and acquiring loot, often in a roguelite fashion.
- Multiplayer primarily focuses on PvP combat, offering competitive and self-improvement opportunities. PvE and creation modes are also present and are considered important for cooperative play and fostering friendships.
Performance:
- Players consistently report severe performance issues, including low frame rates (20-30 FPS) even on high-end systems (RTX 2070s, 4060 Ti, i9 9900k). This suggests a fundamental lack of optimization, potentially related to rendering problems, which significantly impacts gameplay, especially with complex builds.
- A patch is being applied to address a language-related issue within the game. This indicates an ongoing effort to fix specific bugs affecting player experience.
Recommendations:
- Many players advise against purchasing the game in its current state, citing it as unfinished, not worth the money, and requiring significant improvements. Some recommend waiting for fixes, heavy discounts, or until it matures, while others have opted for refunds due to performance issues or general dissatisfaction.
- Despite current issues, some players express support for the game and its potential, recommending it to others. They hope for future content updates and continued development, especially regarding optimization and refinement of core mechanics.
- The game is highly recommended for players who enjoy sandbox building, exercising their imagination, and creating unique vehicles. It appeals to fans of similar titles like TerraTech or Robocraft, particularly for its 'Open Sea' mode and shipbuilding aspects.
- There is a need for more variety and customization options for vehicle components, specifically larger or customizable sails and power devices suitable for aircraft.
- There is a specific desire for optimization and improvement of the building mode's operational methods, suggesting that the current interface or mechanics could be more user-friendly or efficient.
Miscellaneous:
- Players frequently mention that the game feels unfinished or is still in early access, expecting more content, bug fixes, and optimization in future updates. There's a strong hope for continued diligent development.
- Players desire more content, specifically more weapons, interactive battlefield events, paint schemes, and general accessories. There's also a strong interest in cooperative functions, PvP, open-sea gameplay, and more levels.
- Several suggestions focus on improving the building mode's user experience, including better module placement, direct dragging, enhanced keyboard operations, a mini-map, and simpler snapping mechanics. Players suggest looking at games like Avorion and Besiege for inspiration.
- Miscellaneous feedback includes players looking for others to play with, a link to a detailed video review, notes on campaign vs. creative mode play, a tip for boat movement, and comments on language support and module quantity limits.
- Some players express support for domestic game development and acknowledge the developer's serious approach to the buy-to-play market, especially for a genre rarely attempted by local developers.
