Recent reviews by Shatari

With mods it's an amazing game that was tragically abandoned midstride. You'll have to spend a couple of hours planning out which mods to get (due to mods conflicts, and the fact that most of the modders have moved on to greener pastures), but it's very rewarding once you can finally get into it. Most mods can be added into your game without breaking your save, so you can customize on the fly if you run into a problem. I do recommend getting a Pixel printer replacement mod (because otherwise your game will break, and you need this from the beginning for it to work) and the 'Hoarder's Inventory' mod (which has to be added from the beginning to work, and is the biggest QoL mod on offer).

Without mods? Don't bother, you'll get frustrated at the lack of QoL and missing features. This is a bad knockoff of an early build of Terraria, and the dev team dropped it like a hot potato without fleshing out any of the features. Every single part of the game is half baked, and it will grate on your nerves something fierce. Do yourself a favor and mod it, or don't bother even trying it.

Like just about all of the DLC for this game, this should have been in the base game or added in a free patch since there's very little actual content. After the recent price increase, this is easily ten times more expensive than it has any right to be. If you don't get it in a bundle then I'd recommend skipping it outright.

It's a good two hour game, but my biggest complaint is that it feels like the tutorial for a game, not a game in and of itself. I'd recommend it on a sale, especially if you like relaxing point and click adventure titles that don't have failure states.

It starts off really slow, gets really grindy, then it slowly starts to get interesting, and right as the main story starts to come online, the game ends. It feels more like the start of a game or a tech demo to funding for a proper title, but by itself it's so bare bones that I can't recommend it. 'Diablo in space' is a concept that doesn't get much love, but this makes no effort to fill the niche.

I can't recommend the vanilla experience, but it's amazing with mods. It's probably my favorite turn based RPG to date, and it's far better than the sequel.

I really liked Infectonator 2, and this is an okay followup but I find it's a bit lacking in places.

On the whole it's an amazingly fun world conquest game with some nice difficult bosses and complications. It's a little too easy once you've got all of the boosts unlocked, but getting to the point where you steam roll everything can be a fun ride. It also runs much better than #2, with very few frame rate dips even on the busiest and most chaotic maps.

The biggest flaw is that it can be very punishing. Even in casual mode you're always feeling the crunch as the difficulty slowly ramps up whether you're succeeding or not (in fact, failure actually makes the game harder so it's hard to experiment), and in a proper game it's very stressful to conquer the world with a "you lose" counter constantly going up. This also prevents you from goofing off or experimenting, since you really don't want to do anything that won't guarantee a win.

Another major flaw is that each run takes about 2 hours longer than it needs to. There is a point where victory is guaranteed and it's just a matter of finishing off the world, but you'll be doing that for a long time. Outside of beating down the labs to keep the cure away, there are no late game surprises that will disrupt you from your slow but steady grind towards victory. You're also expected to beat the game about a dozen times to unlock all of the cool game modifiers, and I exhausted all of the actual content about 2 runs in. This is a game that either needs more content or less grinding to unlock everything. (They also disabled the ability to use Cheat Engine in the game, which is a major bummer because 90% of this game is grinding out the same content so that you can get to the meat of the game. I'd love to be able to disable the global scoreboard in exchange for bypassing the boring "stuff you do every run so that you can have fun" bit and enjoy the "actually having fun" part.)

Finally, the game has some annoying bugs. It's very easy to clip bosses out of bounds using brute zombies, and then you can't kill them. The James Bond boss is very bad to do this, since he likes to stay at the edge of the map, but it's pretty much a guaranteed loss if it happens to any of them.

Now, all of that aside, I would still recommend it (especially since flash emulators don't work well for the first two (yet)), but after you beat it once or twice you'll have seen all there is to see. In 20 hours I got about 10 hours of fun out of it, and that's $5 well spent compared to most games.

I do not like this one nearly as much as I liked all of the ones that came before it, including Alpha Centauri. ...And yet it is still 3AM on a work day, and I should have been in bed four hours ago.

9 out of 10, will ruin my schedule again.

Review for June 22, 2025 since Steam doesn't update the date when you re-review a game:
Up until now the game had a few minor power boosts behind pricey paywalls (between $20 and $30 for a minor buff and a new item type you could craft), but the only real thing that was worth paying for was the monthly $10 fee for Royal Merchant status.

The latest update changes all of that, however, by introducing a trading card game (where you can't trade the cards), and they give massive buffs if you're willing to spend a lot of real money for them. Straight out the gate, if you're willing to spend around $5000 you can have more buffs than a player in a late game guild with all of the 'earn as you play' buffs combined. To be fair, in as much as this system can be, they will be rolling out a minor change that will reduce the cost by a couple of thousand dollars. So if you're joining after July you'll be looking at maybe $3000 tops, if the RNG likes you. (It doesn't remove cards you've already maxed out, though, so you could still spend upwards to $5000 and not finish your collection.)

Now I'm one of those people who hordes ingame premium currency and never spends it, and I've been a Royal Merchant for about 3 years, so I had over a hundred dollars worth of currency to spare and I tried to see what $100 dollars worth of cards would get me. The answer? Not much, not only did I not get one of each of the cards (meaning I don't get all of the boosts), but I also didn't have any of the cards level up to level 2.

Now RNG will vary from player to player, but ask yourself: Is this game worth over $100 just to be able to compete? Because the biggest downside to this new system is that *all* of the future content will be balanced around the fact that you can pay several thousand dollars to unlock super powerful boosts, and even the tier 1 boosts (that I couldn't unlock all of with $100 worth of cards) are game changing.

tl;dr: Are you rich? Would you like to give Kabam several thousand dollars just so that you can play their game? Unless you said "Yes" to both questions, then go play something else. This game isn't aimed at you, and you've been priced out of being able to reach the late game content from this point on.

It's a very buggy port of a mobile game. There's very little narrative flow, and it's mostly just a fun (but janky) ship mini-game combined with a very bad third-person shooter. There's also some mercantile trading, but the profit margins are nonexistent so it's not worth mentioning. The tutorial is very badly laid out, very buggy, and only scratches the surface on many of the mechanics.

Most of the (very limited) story comes from quests that you get from each faction, but they're terribly buggy and many of the triggers won't work without restarting the game each step of the quest. The RPG elements come from leveling up your character, but there's only a few skills so it's not really worth mentioning. You can't customize your appearance, and if you're using a "Legendary ship" then you can't customize your boat either.

The worst part is the grind. Because it's a mobile game, gold is very painful to acquire since you were expected to just buy your way to success. You can't do that in the Steam version, but they didn't include an alternative. Capturing ships is the fastest way to make money, but that's a very buggy process that basically forces you to run around in the third-person shooter mini-game, exploiting the AI of your enemies until you win. It's needlessly tedious, takes a lot of the fun out of the game. Alternatively, you can just spam magic attacks and sink enemy ships for a fraction of the money. It's more fun, but takes about 10x as long to make the same amount of money.

There's not really anything else to say about the game, sadly. For a game about sailing the high seas, it has no depth. The ship mini-game looks cool, and it can be fun, but I would only recommend it on a heavy sale because it's just a mobile game with a fun mini-game and some half-baked buggy side elements.

It would a pretty fun little game if it weren't for some glaring issues.

1, It demands that you make an online profile when you boot up the game, but that doesn't work. I hope you didn't want to see whatever opening cinematic there was, because without that you don't get to.

2. The game can't decide if you should use a controller or a mouse for the UI. You can't reliably use one or the other, you have to switch back and forth between both without much warning. It's not too bad once you know which menus don't work with the controller, but it's always annoying.

3. The UI is broken and annoying. Hint popups open themselves, can't be closed, and will stick around after you switch screens unless you switch to another tab (this is most annoying with the inventory system). The skin menu (the place where all of the DLC is focused) is also a hotmess, which broken previews garbling up the whole page. It's all very unpolished, and it will probably confuse you a few times, as vital information is covered up by a popup that you can't easily close.

4. Most alarming of all, when the game crashes (which is often), it will claim that your save is corrupted. It hasn't actually corrupted my save (yet), but I'm of the lucky ones. There's even a Steam guide for how to 100% the game in a single session because some people can't load their save after they load the game back up. They literally restart from scratch every time, and this is not a new bug. This is the main reason I'm not recommending this game, because it's never going to be fixed.

5. The devs have moved on, and it doesn't look like they ever really cared in the first place. It's not a good impression here. I've got a couple of other games by this dev team, but I have a feeling I won't be buying anything else they make if this is their idea of an acceptable product. I just really hope those other games I bought aren't going to be this unpolished and buggy.