Recent reviews by Sir Piecemaker

This is a bit of an odd one. But let's start with the good parts.

The atmosphere in the game is dripping. Truly amazing. The open sea feels vast, empty and scary. The islands tend to look unique and individual. Roaming the sea and discovering new, interesting locations is a blast.

Music is, again, nice and atmospheric. There is not that many tracks, so you will hear repeats, especially when high terror. The game however understands the impact of silence, so music is not playing all the time. Therefore, it works.

The universe is...peculiar, to say the least. Filled with interesting concepts. You will be selling souls to devils, transporting clay golems and half-dead colonists, trading food for silk with the spiders, and it all feels like it belogns together. It isn't exactly explained how those thigns are possible and how they came to be, but with a bit of suspension of disbelief, it creates an amazing world where you look forward to what the next island has in store.

Onto the bad.

I am not quite sure what the game is trying to be. Exploration, definitely, though for a very limited time. THe Unterzee is not as big as it seems. Lovecraftian, by all means. But...RPG? I suppose it has elements. There is economy, which you must spend a good portion of time on, but it sucks. Lacks even basic features any economy game should have (like buying in bulk). There is no journal where you can see prices of items and in what locations, which sure, you could just use pen and paper, but bear in mind that there is a ton of goods and supplies, and no port buy & sells each. Combined with the amount of islands, either you type every item they sell down and their price, or you use the wiki. Combat is...awful. Shine a light, wait for your weapon, fire, do it until it dies. Trade routes are not very profitable until you get a bigger ship, and not even then. Still, you can't NOT get money, so you will be stuck using rubbish trade routes and whatever you can for a long time. Aka, grind. I despise grinding, but perhaps that is just me. Game has permadeath and semi-random generation, but it is not a roguelike that you can finish in an hour or two. You could spend 10 hours grinding for a slightly better ship, just to die because of rng (yes, there are a lot of random events and chances. You can improve your chances by stats, but it would take ages to improve all stats to a level where rng is eliminated).

Game has a habit of not telling you what to do. I appreciate the freedom, but some info is necesseary and I found myself spending way too much time on the wiki. Not because I am lazy to figure it for myself, but when I need item X and know not where that is obtained, I will not spend 3 hours going by all the islands to see if they sell it and doing all the random skill checks and random events to figure it out. I value my own time more than that.

Now, let's say you got the money, you go to an island and the only thing that awaits you it text. Walls and walls of text. I don't mind a presentation in text, especially if like here it is done in eloquent, elegant and beautiful way of speaking, but this is a bit too much. Perhaps mostly because...well, nothing cool ever happens. Everything is done in text, so there is no payout for anything. You might obtain a cool item (cool since it has good stats) or something but there is never anything actually interesting on screen. You boat moves really slowly either way and then you just read. Not to mention that the text is seriously small and strains my eyes.

To wrap this up, the game has great atmosphere, universe and feel of wonder. However, all you will be doing is sailing a ship so slow you could read an actual book in the meantime, grinding for stuff, at danger that you could lose hours of progress, courtesy of rng, only to read more eye-straining text. And occasionally find a wall of text that is actually interesting to read. Is it a good game? Perhaps. Was my experience good? At time. Would I buy this? No. Not even with the discount.

To end this, let me tell you how I turned the game off and decided "Not anymore". I had a quest, was doing it nicely. Went to place A to continue it. At place A, I discovered I did not have the option to continue since the place was locked to me. After consulting the wiki, I found out I need item X to unlock the place A. Item X is only rare chance of finding in a random event or bought from place B, at the other side of the map. So, I sailed to place B, which took forever, bought the item, sailed back to place A, again took forever and nothing happened the entire time, and unlocked the place A. And then I found out I need item Y to continue the quest. Item Y can only be bought at place B. No, there was no warning. There was not information from which would divulge the item is at all necesseary. No one mentioned it in a wall of text. There was simply no way of knowing until I got there. And at that point, I went "This is simply not worth my time". And shut it off.

UPDATED REVIEW:

Regrettably, I find the game ultimately boring and repetitive. Some gameplay design is also dubious, to say the least. I love herbalism, the feel of it, but to do it without a huge strain on your eyes, you have to actually downgrade graphics. Clever.

Other than that, everything just takes forever to do, and the end result is not that impressive either. Not a bad game per-se, but just...disappointing.

A no from a guy for whom it used to be a yes.

If so you wish, you can now read the original review below. When I had played it for less.

Allow me to say this first.

The game is in early access, and is by all means flawed. There are bugs. There are things you will dislike. There are parts you mind find amazing, but sadly not yet implemented. All of this is present.

But besides that, I do honestly believe that if you have ever shown a liking towards the idea of being a medieval peasant, who can maybe work himself out to be a capable warrior, skilled farmer or perhaps a prized alchemist, this might rock your boat.

Let us first summarize the pros. The game presents and open world with other players, but you must not worry about getting stabbed with a nearest stick as soon as you find another human being. Not only is this forbidden on most server, it also has negative consequences. As I mentioned above, there are several profession you can do, and freely combine if you for example want to do basic farming as well as basic smithing, though such merging will prevent you from being a master in either. The game requires you to play in groups of multiple people, which could be considered a downside, but I like this feature, since it can create a friendlier atmoshphere, forge possible friendships and makes it feel much more like a medieval town that you work towards. The various professions have quite a bit of depth in them and all are equally important to the community.
Very importantly, I find the developers to be fairly active and helpful, despite some fearing an unknown studio will fail. The updates are surprisingly common and you can also track what they are up to from a number of videos on their channel.

Now about the bad. It might be very easy for someone to find the game repetitive, as you are often required to amass a certain amount of resources before you can focus on something perhaps a bit more desirable. To add to the injury, you will see a lot of progress bars, which might be fast, but are frequent. The game is not the most optimized in the world, though it went up a lot lately, and is surprisingly stable. The combat system leaves a lot to be desired, mainly in precision. This will hopefully (and likely) be changed in a later update, yet as of now, it must be mentioned.

The recollection.

The game has an incredible atmosphere, bringing you to the harsh world of feudal times. If you ever wanted to be a medieval smith, hunter, farmer, alchemist or perhaps a builder, you will find this game quite pleasing. The long time it takes to complete various tasks such as building houses or creating complex tools can be infuriating, but if you manage to find a friendly group of people with whom to work on a village and get to speak with them on, say, teamspeak (which is very common, no worries), a lot of this boredom will dissipate, thanks in no small part thank to having people to talk with as you do your things. With all that, the game deserves your attention and perhaps further investigation.

And that is my recommendation.

I will keep it simple. What you are getting here is probably the best meele combat game you will ever play. The weight and feel of the fighting is unmatched. The games looks very pretty, has great soundtrack, and will provide you with tons of fun, plus some free updates.

Get. This. Game.