The game has decent sailing combat but that's about it. The game is very basic and relies heavily on it's player community to keep you from realizing it's development and level of quality outside of the sailing is the same level of quality and immersiveness you'd expect from a Mount & Blade mod. Just with nothing but boats, sea and incomplete menus to look at. It's been in early access for over a year and it STILL has a wip background and graphics for it's port menu system which looks like it came from a flash rpg. Missions are dialogueless, randomly generated 1 v 1 ship battles with selectable difficulties or locations to bring X amount of goods to. All you are given is a location. Oh and there's no music.

No ship damage physics aside from those static flat bullet holes you'd see in fps games that don't look like actual cannon round impacts and poorly animated ship crews that only sometimes actually emulate what they are supposed to be doing. Pretty sure they always look the same too. My pirates all look like skipper. Ships can go on fire, eject fake debris when hit, have holes in their sails and mast broken but you can't put real holes in their hull which makes it visibly difficult to tell how close a ship is to dying other than it's hull health indicator that only shows when you have your perspective zeroed in on it dead center of you're screen.

Another bad thing about the missions you can run is these engagements, especially early on, can take anywhere from 20 - 50 minutes from what I've experienced. Other than entering random engagements in the overworld which is a bad idea when you're starting, this is your only way to progress. You also get stuck with a timer anytime you leave a port or a fight that prevents you from fighting usually for 90 seconds. This can get really annoying when you're trying to farm out easy small missions to get started ontop of the length of the fight itself.

The game is a soulless grind that makes you grind out the skills (at least 3) for various ships before you can properly operate certain real ships that don't suck. So that means even if you get lucky and can buy a good big ship you need to grind out at least 2 or 3 other crappy smaller ships in numerous missions that take around half-an-hour just to actually unlock the skills for it because you need to unlock the skills for the older ones in order... it's like Warthunder. For an example: If you want to sail a decent early ship called the Mercury you have to first use the lynx till it's ship knowledge is at 3 levels in experience. The lynx is a piece of ♥♥♥♥. It is so bad it's worse than the free starter ship. It has 2 less cannons than the starter ship and is slower. It's a punishment to sail. Then you get to use the Privateer which is fairly decent but squashable for it's 3 levels. Then and only then can you actually get skill knowledge for using the Mercury, which is another prelude to a next ship. This would be normal if it didn't take you around 10 hours of game time running basic little randomly generated 1v1 fights that take almost half an hour. You can still buy a big ass ship and pay an arm and a leg for it's crew equipment and cannons but you can't gain experience for it until you sail certain lesser ones.

Doing randomly generated missions with no dialogue, story or purpose other than to just grind sucks. This game has no personality. The pvp is good if you like sailing around for hours looking for a fight due to the sparse playerbase and the balance is so bad for ships that the most meta PVP ship is the one you're given to start with because it's fast as hell, can damage or disable almost anything and is repaired and replaced for free whereas actually bought and developed ships cost game currency to repair and replace everything like crew, cannons and like 3 basic repair resources which becomes like 5 I've heard in the larger ships. You can lose all that to the games nooby ship if the person knows what they are doing.

One last thing: All of your progress can be reset, wiped all across the board if people find and abuse an exploit to become rich over night. You could grind for months and just find out that poof it's all gone. You're just refunded the money which is easy to get. It's the experience you had to grind out those basic missions for all that time for better ships that hurts. It didn't happen to me I was lucky enough (or not considering they won't give me a refund) to come in after the big reset.

The game has decent sailing combat but that's about it. The game is very basic and relies heavily on it's player community to keep you from realizing it's development and level of quality outside of the sailing is the same level of quality and immersiveness you'd expect from a Mount & Blade mod. Just with nothing but boats, sea and incomplete menus to look at. It's been in early access for over a year and it STILL has a wip background and graphics for it's port menu system which looks like it came from a flash rpg. Missions are dialogueless, randomly generated 1 v 1 ship battles with selectable difficulties or locations to bring X amount of goods to. All you are given is a location. Oh and there's no music. No ship damage physics aside from those static flat bullet holes you'd see in fps games that don't look like actual cannon round impacts and poorly animated ship crews that only sometimes actually emulate what they are supposed to be doing. Pretty sure they always look the same too. My pirates all look like skipper. Ships can go on fire, eject fake debris when hit, have holes in their sails and mast broken but you can't put real holes in their hull which makes it visibly difficult to tell how close a ship is to dying other than it's hull health indicator that only shows when you have your perspective zeroed in on it dead center of you're screen. Another bad thing about the missions you can run is these engagements, especially early on, can take anywhere from 20 - 50 minutes from what I've experienced. Other than entering random engagements in the overworld which is a bad idea when you're starting, this is your only way to progress. You also get stuck with a timer anytime you leave a port or a fight that prevents you from fighting usually for 90 seconds. This can get really annoying when you're trying to farm out easy small missions to get started ontop of the length of the fight itself. The game is a soulless grind that makes you grind out the skills (at least 3) for various ships before you can properly operate certain real ships that don't suck. So that means even if you get lucky and can buy a good big ship you need to grind out at least 2 or 3 other crappy smaller ships in numerous missions that take around half-an-hour just to actually unlock the skills for it because you need to unlock the skills for the older ones in order... it's like Warthunder. For an example: If you want to sail a decent early ship called the Mercury you have to first use the lynx till it's ship knowledge is at 3 levels in experience. The lynx is a piece of shit. It is so bad it's worse than the free starter ship. It has 2 less cannons than the starter ship and is slower. It's a punishment to sail. Then you get to use the Privateer which is fairly decent but squashable for it's 3 levels. Then and only then can you actually get skill knowledge for using the Mercury, which is another prelude to a next ship. This would be normal if it didn't take you around 10 hours of game time running basic little randomly generated 1v1 fights that take almost half an hour. You can still buy a big ass ship and pay an arm and a leg for it's crew equipment and cannons but you can't gain experience for it until you sail certain lesser ones. Doing randomly generated missions with no dialogue, story or purpose other than to just grind sucks. This game has no personality. The pvp is good if you like sailing around for hours looking for a fight due to the sparse playerbase and the balance is so bad for ships that the most meta PVP ship is the one you're given to start with because it's fast as hell, can damage or disable almost anything and is repaired and replaced for free whereas actually bought and developed ships cost game currency to repair and replace everything like crew, cannons and like 3 basic repair resources which becomes like 5 I've heard in the larger ships. You can lose all that to the games nooby ship if the person knows what they are doing. One last thing: All of your progress can be reset, wiped all across the board if people find and abuse an exploit to become rich over night. You could grind for months and just find out that poof it's all gone. You're just refunded the money which is easy to get. It's the experience you had to grind out those basic missions for all that time for better ships that hurts. It didn't happen to me I was lucky enough (or not considering they won't give me a refund) to come in after the big reset.