Recent reviews by Baron

Sea of Thieves is the most wasted potential I have ever seen in a video game. It is a colourful, pirate themed rendition of something like Rust or Tarkov. However, instead of traversing a ruined wasteland and accquiring random apocalypse themed junk and then defending said junk from other players, you instead sail around somewhere resembling the carribbean on a 16th century ship in search of pirate treasure. What separates SoT from those games and from many other games is that the pirate ship is a physical object that you and up to three players must operate in order to sail around the game's world and complete quests. One player cannot steer the ship and adjust the sails and fire cannons, and they must work with other players to accomplish this goal. This to me is the most interesting part of the game. Unlike many other multiplayer games, where players operate more as lone wolves temporarily grouped together than an actual team, SoT requires that you act as one cohesive unit. I genuinely really enjoyed this mechanic and would like to see more games do this in the future.

That is the end of positive things I have to say about this game. Now for the negatives!

SoT, somewhat fittingly, is as wide as an ocean and about as deep as a puddle. The core gameplay loop is very simple and little, if anything, has been done to improve on it in the five years since the game's release. In short, you begin a randomly generated quest, travel to the island the quest points you towards, kill a number of skeletons or solve a very, very easy puzzle, receive treasure for doing so and then return that treasure to a drop off point. Doing so allows you to increase your level in one of six colour coded loot vendors in order to be rewarded with increasingly gaudy cosmetic items. There are about 6-7 quests in the game, and each is truly replayable about once or twice before all enjoyment has been extinguished. There are also tall tales, which is static story content devoid of random elements, and thus it has even less replayability than the aforementioned fetch quests. The only interesting element at play is the potential threat of encountering other players at any moment, which adds vital thrill to an otherwise utterly dull experience.

The world itself very pretty, but bland and empty. There is no particular reason to travel to any of the game's islands save for the fact that you need to go there as part of the thing you're doing. You won't find anything cool, interesting or unique by exploring them of your own volition. It feels like the same set of palm trees, wooden fortifications, ruined ships spread out across two dozen identikit islands arranged in different shape. There are technically NPCs, but they do nothing of interest other than stand in place and reel off unfunny dialogue about which one dimensional adjective they happen to be. The game is divided into four different areas, but three of them are functionally the same, with the only notable difference being the colour scheme. The fourth is different, as it is home to volcanoes that shoot heat seeking rocks that instagib you and everyone on your ship. Unsurprisingly, this area is not frequented by players.

As for combat, it is varied. As previously mentioned, naval combat is fun and only gets more entertaining the better you get at it. Any combat that takes place on foot however, is completely scuffed. It feels like and is a complete afterthought. The hit registration code is awful. Often, you will appear to land shots on enemy targets that do no damage, or shoot at nothing only to apparently land a hit on something that wasn't there. You cannot rely on the hitmarker to convey accurate information, as for reasons unknown the hitmarker is calculated clientside, not serverside. Combat does not improve when you battle NPC enemies. They are not intelligent, threatening, or even varied. Most can be defeated by mindlessly clicking the left mouse button with your sword equipped. However, this act will take a very long time, as Rare gave its enemies massively inflated health in order to compensate for the complete lack of challenge they would otherwise pose.

As a final point, this game takes up nearly 90GB of space on your hard drive. This is 90GB of mostly time limited cosmetics. It is functionally dead space, because never mind the fact you can't unlock these cosmetics anymore, you'll never actually see anyone wearing them in game.

Some of you might be thinking "Hey Baron you loser, why did you spend 200 plus hours in a bideo jame only to write a negative review about it??" Well, Nietzschean Last Man, let me tell you. I have come to the conclusion that SoT's problems won't ever be resolved. Recent updates have been extremely lacking. While SoT's updates were always kind of weak, since 2022 a significant amount of development time has gone into Adventures, which are time limited poor man's Tall Tales liked by no one. Adventure mode has received no new permanent content since April of last year, and is unlikely to receive any new content before the end of this year. Despite everything I've written, I did at one point find this game to be quite enjoyable. That is no longer the case. Given the current and likely future state of the game, I now cannot recommend it to anyone.

Greetings, traveller!
I am the Pitbull of the Woods.
Have you seen any orphanages nearby?

Actually well put together smash brothers clone. Only problem is that it needs more characters

MARKET EXPOSURE

The witcher is a documentary in which you follow the story of a man who works as a monster slayer in order to feed his crippling addiction to a card game

An RTS? In this time of day, in this state of the industry, localised entirely on Steam?

You'd better believe it!

ACTUAL REVIEW

I played the beta for around 10 hours, so you can add that to my total playtime.

Ancestors Legacy is an RTS in the same style as Company of Heroes. You control squads of men, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and use combined arms tactics to win the day. There are a total of four factions: Vikings, Anglo Saxons, Germans and Slavs. Though they use a similar set up wrt to buildings and structure, each of their units play different enough to make them unique.

There's a fairly lengthy single player campaign, comprising of several smaller campaigns. There's a tutorial Viking campaign, a proper Viking campaign, two Anglo Saxon campaigns, a German and a Slav campaign. The design of the menu suggests that more campaigns will be forthcoming.

Base building is largely simplified, but this doesn't really concern much as you never really did much base building in CoH anyway beyond put your barracks at the edge of your base so the first rifle squad would get out and start capping things faster faster.

Multiplayer is very functional and has stat tracking, ranks, all the things you'd expect of a serious campaign and also a server browser for more relaxed games for those who want to play online but aren't so competitive.

The only bad things I have to say about it are that there aren't many Skirmish maps in the game, but this is something that will be rectified in the future, when modding/a map editor/more content is released for the game.

not buying this game is in violation of the words of karras
all should hear the woords of karras... the woooords of karras...

A stealth/strategy game in the same vein as Commandos, set in the cursed isles of Japan. If you liked that game, this one is an absolute must. It even has a timer that reminds you of the last time you quicksaved.

The spiritual successor to Rollercoaster Tycoon 3. If you don't have a toaster or a potato for a computer, buy it. It's very good.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

"coughing noises"

More like Satan's Golf Course of Misery and Suffering. Buy now for hours of atonement!