Recent reviews by Captain DuoDex

Do not waste your money on this product. It is unfinished and will remain so.

Go play modded KSP1 for a superior experience in every way.

The core economic gameplay is...fine...the UI for it is bad but overall it is a decent foundation for a game.

The rest of the game is lacking:
I actually like the new warfare system, but it is buggy and was obviously only tested in a cursory fashion.
There is no flavor for almost every country and most large countries play exactly the same.
Internal politics are remarkably irrelevant and poorly designed.
Pops, migration, and purchasing power are nonsensically balanced and make no sense.
Diplomatic options are extremely limited, simplified, and the AI is severely schizophrenic.

Paradox has decided not to test things, not to rework things that are not working, and ultimately not to finish this game, which is increasingly common behavior from them.

Do not buy this game in its current state.

Still going strong after nearly a decade.

While Paradox has made some big steps towards a logistics model, the free patch on release was bug-ridden and requires more attention. The DLC is even worse, containing multiple instances of obviously untested mechanics and with CTDs left, right, and center.

This is not a good game.

The gameplay loop is grindy & seems to favor microtransactions/DLC purchases instead of a reasonable amount of time spent playing. The community, while friendly, is far, far too small for a game of this scale. The graphics are poor. The animation is poor. The mechanics for the actual sailing part of the game - the part most people are interested in - seem overly abstracted, while the standard online game mechanics (XP, gold, the economy) have gotten more attention and yet still suck.

Nor is it (as some of the other reviews seem to have suggested) an accurate game about tall ships.

I've worked as crew on several smaller ships, and this game misses everything I liked about them. Where's the fun of organizing and optimizing a crew to be the most efficient? The option for celestial navigation & plotting tables? The slow but glorious feeling of picking up speed after setting sail?

And since I'd hoped this game would enable my Aubrey/Maturin fantasies, I'll detail why it failed there too: there's no story. There's no characters, no sense of discovery, no tense feelings during chases. It's a terrible open-world game that should have had a story component to introduce you to the game instead of bald tutorials that barely scratched the surface.

Rating: 1/5 - poor graphics, while mechanically more impressive than most sailing games out there still fails to capture the feeling of being in command on a tall ship, and no reason to play other than ranking up.

Complex physics made into simple explosions.

Highly moddable.

I greatly enjoyed this game for about three years, until it released and it turned out didn't really have a sustainable business plan post-release. Too bad, could've kept chugging with incremental physics updates, new systems, and new parts for another five years easily.

Fun little rogue-like shooter, with punishing difficulty once you start getting into it. Excellent graphic design, although the graphics aren't perfect and there are a few annoying bugs.

7/10