Recent reviews by Henry

So the team is once again at it huh?

I will review the game not the studio we all can make what we wish of the studio.. Their past will not have any effect in this review. Let us get to it then, Bellwright the game often compared to the medieval dynasty or even manor lords. In the game your technically an outlaw against the tyranny of the crown... Thats all neat and the plot is there but the gameplay takes large focus on side missions and building your own setlement rather than pillaging crowns villages and such. You start your grand adventure in one of the lower regions apparently the regions are compared via wealth of their occupants??? anyways. You place your little hut in and get your first settlers and such, again neat stuff. Then when you have assembled your let us just call it the opposition movement for now, youl be then sent away in multitude of quests what are mostly consisting of bring me this bring me that kinda of business. The game also has directional combat and somewhat of a troop management altho that is very shallow. Your only options are mostly to dictate does your brave folk engage or hold their ground and there is no formations nor any actual orders considering combat movement etc. So its pretty much charge or hold and combat in larger groups is bit messy.. I am not saying it would not be in real life but you do not really have access to control once you or the enemy has engaged its just a brawl and usually those whom have more numbers wins or has better gear.. The combat really does not require any planning or skill its mostly about numbers and gear. If we dive deeper into AI it is okayish altho ai movement and routing is bit clunky. Also I do not like how the mindset of the AI works it prioritises hunger over possible death.. I had raid coming and my people stopped fighting due they got hungry so they all got backstabbed due they simply dropped their weapons and started walking to the camp?? The map of the game is nice and has nice medieval feeling altho cities seems bit odd due no one does anything there everyone either stands around or just walks around. The setlement building aspect is pre fabricated so you have pre made structures like in mannor lord what you simply place down and then get the resources for em. The building system overall has nice tech tree and such yet it provides very little use. For example atm setlements provide almost 0 protection for you villagers as we lack pretty much any fortifications or traps or obstacles for the enemy, so fights are mostly open field brawls. Also what is bit disapointing for me is we have no means of travel than on foot or fast travel.. Would be nice to have horses or wagons for troop movement as you often are spreaded thin around the map so kinda breaks immersion for me if I know a raid is happening there and I suddenly knock a sign and teleport there.. As EA it is doing nice it has plenty of content already and hopefully more to come.

So remake of the sea dogs.

I played Sea Dogs before this and we all know the good and bad of that game. Now have the devs addressed the shortcomings in this remake? Yes and no, the remake mostly seems a fresh coat of paint over the old. I am not by any means expecting a completely new game after all this is a remake/publishment of the sea dogs.

Now let's look at where the game shines as its predecessor.

I like the nostalgia of the game it's not a bad game by any means yet it can be frustrating games at times due to bugs and some clunkyness. I also enjoy the wide range of possibilities in the game from merchant to pirate or smuggler or whatever you choose. Also although sometimes the game leaves you with few directions or objectives I like how time evolves and with that, the story unfolds... random events and such so you kinda hang around doing your own thing, and then all of a sudden your head deep in some mystery or job contract.

As in my old review of sea dogs similar things have made their way to this list.

The game has mostly kept the old story of the sea dogs with the addition of new quests etc. The game has new graphics yet that comes in the form of new textures mostly. Also, the game is supposedly made more player-friendly by adding an exploration mode which should aid the sea dogs' ridiculously tight time limits. There are also further small improvements for example if you are in enemy territory you now have a detection hint in the top left corner which serves little to no purpose after all sneaking is not kinda a thing its just mostly walking and staying far away enough from the enemy.

Now let's dive into gameplay. Does the gameplay feel rewarding fun and entertaining? To me yes, yet the game is awfully unbalanced in terms of enemies and performance. You're faced with fights against odds you can barely beat. Some missions may strip your gear off and give you the worst weapons possible against hostiles with flintlocks etc.. Tier 5 ships chase down tier 3 ships and when in combat they seemingly change their mind and run away?.. Also the ships on the fast travel map act like radar-guided missiles, zooming at you with lightning speed.

The unbalancing and some bugs or clunkiness often lead to saving scumming for me at least, which breaks the immersion a bit.. as you supposedly meant to do your own story and play by your rules, not the storylines.
Overall do I recommend it for its price? No, I do not, if the game would have for example revamped more of the gameplay aspects like movement and combat, etc then that could have made a huge difference. Again I do not expect a completely new game with fresh systems but I do hope a bit more from this rather than new textures and some slight changes here and there.

I personally hate that there is only yes or no to choose in the rating, but anyways lets get to it.

I like the game yet I also am having a hard time to put all this together. This is part of a sequel so there is 2 games before this.. What I just do not understand is what happened? Why was this released in such horrid condition. As much of the systems could have been kinda brought over and refined etc.. Yet we are atm getting a game what is playable yet it has so much what just pisses people off. These things includes bugs, poor performance, systems that don't really work, unbalanced finances this list goes on and on. I get the thing that its early access but I feel that they could have taken more time to refine this. Lot of stuff in the game is not explained like well I took some missions and decided to go check the boats for sale so I would know how much I gotta make.. well I did not know it will cancel my missions if I do that. Also then after I made some missions I realized how stupid the economy is the mear fact that none of the long run missions really are worth it to do is mind blowing ( Yes if you need the miles then yeah nice way to get them for the cert) Anyways I did some calculations.

Vessel: Tier 1 gargo
Mission: Longest one you can take on that vessel the 17NM one
Value PNM: 7350-+

Vessel: Tier 1 gargo
Mission: Shortest ones the 0.3NM ones
Value The value for 0.3 NM is 20 000

We can see from this that the value of the longer mission is 7350+- yet you can technically make 60 000 in 0.9NM journey by doing the short mission. So in short ones the value is over 60 000 PNM while in long ones its less than 10 000 PNM its like its completely reversed or sum by you making more on short missions than actually the long and time taking ones.

If we look over all the bugs and unbalanced stuff etc.. Yes the game is beutifull and I see lot of potential. I would not say I don't reccomend this at all yet I can't reccomend it at this stage.

So lets break it down.. I like it yet I do not. The game has its ups and downs I liek the style and how its placed all together yet I would say refining it would be in order.

Yet there is 4 things what just screams why? and no!

1: The game can be extremely frustrating and your in constant loop of well save scumming aka saving loading saving loading.. This is made worse by the well vague and not informative journals and objectives. There is many cases where the journal says sail there yet when you arrive you can be completely on your own to actually find what your ment to do. I found this in the first missions sail to the close up iland and that was it I had to go trough the entire iland to find what I was looking for.

2: The game keeps you in constant rush.. Many missions may give you barely the amount of time needed or if your for example intrecepted by few pirates you will fail due you simply do not have enough time left to make it. Or for example some of the gargo missions if your last resort is to expend the gargo the mission will technically fail due you do not have the correct ammount you left with from harbour. This forces you to either reload older save or buy the missing stuff yourself.

3: The game throws you directly to deep end.. I did the tutorials yet I found them very vague and that they lacks a lot of info you need. For example ship stuff you cant just say use action key to fire or ship has to have wind angles etc.. yet nothing was actually demonstrated with for example pictures or something rather than just text how you should do it.. So in the end most of the stuff you just gotta figure out yourself or look it up from intrenet what breaks immersion for me as I need to constantly go popping up in yt to see how I can do this.

4: The bugs.. the unbalanced enemys.. Its funny in the world map the enemys can catch up your lugger yet in the sea aka combat etc they cant this results in when you flee they just catch you up again and again so you cant really for example flee. I had pirate lugger and the moment I got away he just catched up again and I had to flee again and again and in the end he even sinked me due storm came. Then there is the story braking and these time limits what are in many cases not shown anywhere so you have to do your own book keeping I dont say its a bad thing yet sometimes its bit frustrating.

I do hope in the new verison of this game what they are making or well idk is it just a facelift for this but I hope they look at the short comings of this game and improve due this is enjoyable yet frustrating at the same time and I dont like the whole constant save scumming due your getting rekt or bankrubt all the time due many battles can be too costly for you or when you fail something the result of that wont be mild.

Would be a lie to say that this is a bad game, it is not. Yet there is many aspects in it what makes the game somewhat frustrating or not that enjoyable. To me it was some of the nations. for example finns. They are small tribe yet to grow the tribe you would need to expand yet to do so your faced with simple issue of manpower for example there is sweden and the novgorod whom has thousnds if not tens of thousends of troops yet you may be able to muster up few armies at best due the scale of your coin and food. All the time I have spent in the game so far is technically been idling fast forwarding the time so I could get the coin etc needed for improovements and trade agreements etc. I feel that for some nations or tribed it is very tidious to even begin expanding as you would well almost straight up get massacered by the bigger or close nations of yours. For example I was forced to pick a little ♥♥♥♥ of tribe hell of a long distance away just because next to me is sweden and novgorod and their now allies. It ended up by me getting wrecked as in order to maintain somewhat of stability I was forced to leave helsinki pretty much skeleton crewed. And the moment I had moved my troops the Novgorod decides to start war and simply just opens the gate of helsinki and says your ♥♥♥♥♥♥. As its just wave after wave of thousends of troops. so in the end they will just slowly expend your troops.And I know I could simply pick another place start in or try other tactics and methods yet I feel that the game is favored more towards playing as big nations like swededn england etc as for some smaller tribes etc you have very slim very slim chances if you end up in war with something bigger than yourself so your forced to move far away to obtain additional land and income and leaving your homeland pretty much unprotcted.

Unplayble.. I start greating a new game the game goes into loading screen and thats it.. tried running it in and after what long time still in loading screen. So I cannot say if its good or not but to me as its unplayable and have had no similar issue with any other game ever I must leave bad review.

I am lost for words... not in a good way.

Did not expect this to be how I put it so raw.

Idea is there and its unique in its own way, yet as many comments like mine states its not smooth.. not at all probally this should not even be out yet. Landscape is terrible, rocks and trees floats in air and tools and props. also the constant lagging due the unstability of the game takes huge toll on the game experience. I know it in EA but still as of now I render this simply unplayable and cannot recommend this.

So, Forest 2..

I mean, I knew it was made by the same people who made the Forest, yet I sadly can say I expected bit more than better graphics and improved building system.. and a map ofc. Other than that id say this is just almost a copy of the Forest.. Yes early access blah blah... but still I would have expected bit more of new assets.. as in the end of the day this is classified as new game, yet I see this as pretty much a remake. Yes the game has some positive stuff like nice landscape and companions, But it has been almost 5 years and this is all they ended up making? I tought that the companions were more immersive and they would have actually more meaningfull meaning rather than be slaves to the character. I have played quite a small time yet I cannot mask the disappointment.. If theres no major new additions id say its a pass on my behalf as just tought they had bringed bit more to the table as this is new game afterall not a remake.

Joo ellikäs ASENTO!

Noniin meillä on tässä aikamoinen peli, hauska, hullunkurinen Suomen Armeijan simulaatio. Tuo hyvin muistoja omista ajoista ja näyttä yllättävän tarkan kuvan intistä eli siinä on onnistuttu. Hienoa on myös nähdä että meidän you tubettajiakin on sinne päässyt. Ei voi kyllä muuta sanoa kun että aivan erinomainen suoritus!

LEPO!