I agree. Black Flag got s lot of comparisons to Pirates!, but while it was pretty great (tailing and land missions aside), it didn’t come close to the sheer freedom of this game.
I think the closest modern games have come to scratching that itch have been indie rags-to-riches warband simulators like Mount & Blade, Kenshi, or Starsector, though none are a perfect successor.
I’ve been playing Airship Kingdoms Adrift, and while it’s got some definite jank, it has a similar feel to Sid Meiers Pirates. Not the best, but the closest I’ve found.
Thanks for the recommendation! Ouch, those Steam reviews are not gentle about the state of the game. Saw this developer response under one:
Thank you for your passionate review. It’s clear that many people had high hopes for this game, and unfortunately, we fell short due to various factors including mishandled feedback, poor hiring choices, and bad business decisions. It’s been almost a year since the game was completed, and I’ve lost a lot of sleep over how many things we screwed up so badly. However, we have to move on and put what we’ve learned to good use. Reading your feedback warmed my heart in a way that we knew people care enough to play and felt emotionally invested in this kind of game, and if we put out something great at one point in the future, there’ll be a chance to redeem ourselves. For now, your feedback is fair and I totally agree with everything. We might be able to make a few more updates in the near future, and I’m sure we might be able to do something about the refueling situation at least.
So even the devs weren’t happy about things. Is it still worth getting even with its flaws?
I would definitely say don’t pay full price. There are some quality of life issues that could turn people off to the game, menus that are unnecessarily complicated to navigate, it can be hard to navigate the world as well. The story line isn’t anything to write home about, and the voice acting is somewhere just south of grating. And the economy is deep enough to easily exploit but not deep enough to really be engaging.
The two things that I love about the game is kitting out the ships and the combat. The ship fitting is pretty in depth with a lot of different weapon, armor, command and power options that can make each ship unique and well suited to different tasks, from cargo hauling to tanking to brawling to sniping. It has some issues though.
The combat is where it shines IMO, its a pretty simple premise, your one to three ships against their one to three ships. You can issue simple commands to your two followers that tell them how to engage the enemy with options ranging from full on assault, to evasion, to boarding, with an option to turn off direct fire weapons. There is enough variety in gear to make combat in your command ship your own. Whether you want to sit back and snipe or dive in and trade broadsides to port and starboard. The feeling when you make a plan that culminates with you crossing the enemies T, watching their ship get gutted from your broadsides until it goes down flaming. It’s great.
There are some simple and not simple fixes that would take this game from a high-C/low-B to an A or better
Better menu navigation, it currently can be frustrating to know where the store you want, or quest turn in you want is, and theres some shop choices that pressing the escape key brings you back and some that it doesn’t
The option to skip the story and go straight to the open world, maybe this exists and I missed it, but it seems unnecessarily long. And while it mostly stays out of your way, if you’re the type of person who feels the need to finish it, it’s just a bland, and you feel disconnected from the whole thing due to a character added to your crew at the very beginning that everyone talks to instead of you.
The ‘cutscenes’ just feel janky, part of that may be the story, but the flow is just bad in a way that I can’t fully describe.
Better map navigation would be great, one thing that would help would be to increase the travel speed so that you don’t have to rely on the time boost to get from point a to point b in a reasonable amount of time. As it is, the world feels too big and too small at the same time
A less constricting ship fitting, right now certain types of items can only go in certain locations, with specific locations for cargo storage, energy generation, magazines and weapons, and this would be fine but you’re constrained to one deck when fitting the ship. It would be great multiple decks to fit, benefits and detriments to putting certain items in certain locations and being able to place more items in more locations, even if it’s wrong. Give me a hold, a gun deck, a main deck, command deck, and let me put what I want in these locations. Don’t force me to make a viable ship, let me fail or succeed with a crazy set up.
Stop letting me build super death tanks. A schooner shouldn’t be able to engage and destroy a caravel head to head even if the schooner brought some sloops with him
Also give me more ship classes than small medium and large. Give me actual sloops and schooners and frigates and barques and caravels. Through in some galleys and cogs. Give me ships that can unfurl their sails and boogie, ships that crawl from point a to point b, ships that are best kept near port because they aren’t designed to carry enough supplies to travel from one of the map to the other.
The allied ship command system is limited, I would love to have a flag system that could be used to better control your own ships during combat with some preconfigured options, the ability to set up your own flag commands outside of combat and the option to just run up command flags that your ships respond to during combat. This could make combat much more engaging overall, as right now you just tell your allies how to behave and forget about them until you want them to behave differently.
Less pirates, more assholes that you just want to kill and make home port flags a thing and make them mean something.
I’m curious, have you played Starsector? It’s an RPG/space combat sim, not naval combat, but it feels broadly similar. From what you said you liked about this game it seems like you might enjoy it, and it’s ridiculously well polished for a game still in alpha - I’ve encountered virtually no jank or annoying bugs in my playthroughs.
(Trading kind of sucks* due to tariffs making margins low if there’s not a shortage in a good, though there are mods out there to make the economy act more like a more traditional trading sim)
(* Though it has the most fleshed out smuggling system I’ve ever encountered, with stealth mechanics and suspicion meters and economic effects to dumping things on the black market)
I have lost so much time of my life to Starsector. It’s such a good game. I’m probably going to wind up diving back into it soon, see how high I can mod the battle limits
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I agree. Black Flag got s lot of comparisons to Pirates!, but while it was pretty great (tailing and land missions aside), it didn’t come close to the sheer freedom of this game.
I think the closest modern games have come to scratching that itch have been indie rags-to-riches warband simulators like Mount & Blade, Kenshi, or Starsector, though none are a perfect successor.
I’ve been playing Airship Kingdoms Adrift, and while it’s got some definite jank, it has a similar feel to Sid Meiers Pirates. Not the best, but the closest I’ve found.
Thanks for the recommendation! Ouch, those Steam reviews are not gentle about the state of the game. Saw this developer response under one:
So even the devs weren’t happy about things. Is it still worth getting even with its flaws?
I would definitely say don’t pay full price. There are some quality of life issues that could turn people off to the game, menus that are unnecessarily complicated to navigate, it can be hard to navigate the world as well. The story line isn’t anything to write home about, and the voice acting is somewhere just south of grating. And the economy is deep enough to easily exploit but not deep enough to really be engaging.
The two things that I love about the game is kitting out the ships and the combat. The ship fitting is pretty in depth with a lot of different weapon, armor, command and power options that can make each ship unique and well suited to different tasks, from cargo hauling to tanking to brawling to sniping. It has some issues though.
The combat is where it shines IMO, its a pretty simple premise, your one to three ships against their one to three ships. You can issue simple commands to your two followers that tell them how to engage the enemy with options ranging from full on assault, to evasion, to boarding, with an option to turn off direct fire weapons. There is enough variety in gear to make combat in your command ship your own. Whether you want to sit back and snipe or dive in and trade broadsides to port and starboard. The feeling when you make a plan that culminates with you crossing the enemies T, watching their ship get gutted from your broadsides until it goes down flaming. It’s great.
There are some simple and not simple fixes that would take this game from a high-C/low-B to an A or better
Better menu navigation, it currently can be frustrating to know where the store you want, or quest turn in you want is, and theres some shop choices that pressing the escape key brings you back and some that it doesn’t
The option to skip the story and go straight to the open world, maybe this exists and I missed it, but it seems unnecessarily long. And while it mostly stays out of your way, if you’re the type of person who feels the need to finish it, it’s just a bland, and you feel disconnected from the whole thing due to a character added to your crew at the very beginning that everyone talks to instead of you.
The ‘cutscenes’ just feel janky, part of that may be the story, but the flow is just bad in a way that I can’t fully describe.
Better map navigation would be great, one thing that would help would be to increase the travel speed so that you don’t have to rely on the time boost to get from point a to point b in a reasonable amount of time. As it is, the world feels too big and too small at the same time
A less constricting ship fitting, right now certain types of items can only go in certain locations, with specific locations for cargo storage, energy generation, magazines and weapons, and this would be fine but you’re constrained to one deck when fitting the ship. It would be great multiple decks to fit, benefits and detriments to putting certain items in certain locations and being able to place more items in more locations, even if it’s wrong. Give me a hold, a gun deck, a main deck, command deck, and let me put what I want in these locations. Don’t force me to make a viable ship, let me fail or succeed with a crazy set up.
Stop letting me build super death tanks. A schooner shouldn’t be able to engage and destroy a caravel head to head even if the schooner brought some sloops with him
Also give me more ship classes than small medium and large. Give me actual sloops and schooners and frigates and barques and caravels. Through in some galleys and cogs. Give me ships that can unfurl their sails and boogie, ships that crawl from point a to point b, ships that are best kept near port because they aren’t designed to carry enough supplies to travel from one of the map to the other.
The allied ship command system is limited, I would love to have a flag system that could be used to better control your own ships during combat with some preconfigured options, the ability to set up your own flag commands outside of combat and the option to just run up command flags that your ships respond to during combat. This could make combat much more engaging overall, as right now you just tell your allies how to behave and forget about them until you want them to behave differently.
Less pirates, more assholes that you just want to kill and make home port flags a thing and make them mean something.
Thanks for the detailed review!
I’m curious, have you played Starsector? It’s an RPG/space combat sim, not naval combat, but it feels broadly similar. From what you said you liked about this game it seems like you might enjoy it, and it’s ridiculously well polished for a game still in alpha - I’ve encountered virtually no jank or annoying bugs in my playthroughs.
(Trading kind of sucks* due to tariffs making margins low if there’s not a shortage in a good, though there are mods out there to make the economy act more like a more traditional trading sim)
(* Though it has the most fleshed out smuggling system I’ve ever encountered, with stealth mechanics and suspicion meters and economic effects to dumping things on the black market)
I have lost so much time of my life to Starsector. It’s such a good game. I’m probably going to wind up diving back into it soon, see how high I can mod the battle limits