Every voyage is a journey of "Sailing & Beyond" in Sailing Era! Navigate your fleet and sail for fun; run a business; have a romantic encounter in the tavern; capture pirates amid intense battle; explore inland for treasure... Experience foreign culture, make novel discoveries, and sail away!
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I'll check out any game that goes after the promise of Uncharted Waters, Sid Meier's Pirates!, and Port Royale. But I found almost all of this game's systems to be hard to grok. It's a heavily story-driven game, but the Portugal campaign story is so stuffed with filler and distracts from the gameplay so much that it hurts what this game is trying to do. The idea is to have more of a connection with the named characters, but I think it actually hinders my ability to relate to them when they are given such generic dialogue and personalities.
This game's UI similarly works against the player, and after 2 hours of playing it's still hard to know exactly how much supplies I have and how much I am using, which is very fundamental to the game. I have no clue how much money I'm spending or how much a trip to another part of the map will cost. There are a lot of tutorial messages but they overlap with each other so much that it's really not designed to be retained. The core gameplay loop seems fine but a little over-designed for its own good. It seems to use the same ideas as something like Pirates! but that game makes it simple. I don't think adding extra menus and micromanagement particularly helps this game feel good to play. The systems give the appearance of depth but I have a feeling the game 20 hours in will feel a lot like the game at 2 hours in.
This game's UI similarly works against the player, and after 2 hours of playing it's still hard to know exactly how much supplies I have and how much I am using, which is very fundamental to the game. I have no clue how much money I'm spending or how much a trip to another part of the map will cost. There are a lot of tutorial messages but they overlap with each other so much that it's really not designed to be retained. The core gameplay loop seems fine but a little over-designed for its own good. It seems to use the same ideas as something like Pirates! but that game makes it simple. I don't think adding extra menus and micromanagement particularly helps this game feel good to play. The systems give the appearance of depth but I have a feeling the game 20 hours in will feel a lot like the game at 2 hours in.
I am unsure if I am fit to write a review about this game, given my short playtime - but nonetheless, here is what my mind palace has decided upon.
Sailing Era is a game that focuses on travelling the world and exploring uncharted islands and ports across the globe. You can sail the seas and explore islands, forests, ruins, mountains and so on. You get to play with some characters from different parts of the world, from China to Portugal, and each of them with their own set of skills and personalities.
While all of that sounds promising, it pains me to say that there's nothing more to it than that. The tutorial guides you through some of the game's core mechanics (and let me tell you, that the tutorial is a pain in the ass) and you can quickly notice how... well, boring the rest of the game is.
While this may be true for a lot of games that focus on exploration, travelling and delivering products, I think Sailing Era just tried to be a lot of things at once and it did not have success in any of them. There is ship combat AND melee combat, but I only managed to see the sword combat once, and never again.
There are a few issues too with the translation of the game, which do not come as a big issue to me - it is quite normal for Chinese/Korean games nowadays - so I don't think it'd be all too fair to mention them here, but oopsie, I mentioned them anyway. It's not a big problem for me, though.
Still, take this with a grain of salt - I have not played more than 4 hours of this game, and for the moment I do not want to nor do I intend to. The art style and OSTs are quite good, and I feel this is just not the game for me.
I hope that in the future someone will review this game better than I did, but unfortunately, Sailing Era is just not the game for me, and I don't think it will be for most people.
Sailing Era is a game that focuses on travelling the world and exploring uncharted islands and ports across the globe. You can sail the seas and explore islands, forests, ruins, mountains and so on. You get to play with some characters from different parts of the world, from China to Portugal, and each of them with their own set of skills and personalities.
While all of that sounds promising, it pains me to say that there's nothing more to it than that. The tutorial guides you through some of the game's core mechanics (and let me tell you, that the tutorial is a pain in the ass) and you can quickly notice how... well, boring the rest of the game is.
While this may be true for a lot of games that focus on exploration, travelling and delivering products, I think Sailing Era just tried to be a lot of things at once and it did not have success in any of them. There is ship combat AND melee combat, but I only managed to see the sword combat once, and never again.
There are a few issues too with the translation of the game, which do not come as a big issue to me - it is quite normal for Chinese/Korean games nowadays - so I don't think it'd be all too fair to mention them here, but oopsie, I mentioned them anyway. It's not a big problem for me, though.
Still, take this with a grain of salt - I have not played more than 4 hours of this game, and for the moment I do not want to nor do I intend to. The art style and OSTs are quite good, and I feel this is just not the game for me.
I hope that in the future someone will review this game better than I did, but unfortunately, Sailing Era is just not the game for me, and I don't think it will be for most people.