Want to watch Zero Punctuation ad-free? enroll in The escapist + today and support your favorite content creators!
Some of the regular commenters who orbit my magnificence as a roomful of Comicon goers around an attractive woman alone have noticed a curious pattern emerging in my list of favorite games, in which many of them, in some way, feature a pot prominently. Think about it. Return of the Play Dinn. Spiritfarer. Silent Hill 2 has that moment where James Sunderland goes to a boating lake on the day that “the world’s most attentive husbands get in free.” Dark Souls… erm… has a pair of swords that could possibly be repurposed as a mizzen mast. And look at all the other clues – he likes Horatio Hornblower books, he has a bathroom, he is physically dependent on water to continue living – clearly we’ve stumbled upon the secret code that will ensure a positive Yahtzee Croshaw review. Well I had to get to the bottom of this, I would hate to think that any aspect of my behavior had become trustworthy in any way, if my wife found out she would force me to start unloading the dishwasher again. So I played a little bit of Sailing Era last week, an open-ended management RPG set in the Age of Sailing that features ships as prominently as any game, and which managed to impress me from the start for having the clever foresight. to go out in mid-January when there’s shit about everything else worth talking about.
Sailing Era is a Chinese game. Which are similar to the Japanese games, except that the characters have a hint of desperate panic in their eyes because they fear being wiped out by the government. On top of that, the main clue that gave it away was that the fucking thing was in Chinese by default and I had to wade through the menus trying to guess my way to the language option. Which may well kick off my first review: It’s located about as well as an American tourist in the arctic circle. The dialogue is poorly framed in the rest of the interface with occasional missing spaces and line breaks in the middle of words, and overall it reads as if it’s been roughed up in an alley by Google Translate. Which is in immediate contrast to the vibe of internationalism that Sailing Era is trying to convey, it’s supposed to be about following a variety of characters from around the world in a wonderful era of exploration and discovery where all the diverse peoples of the world they can come together and find common ground on how much they hate Europeans.
Sailing Era is very ambitious and at the same time quite simplified. He sets out to make a playground of the entire clitoris world, every sea and every continent mapped out for you to clear systematically, with every major port and settlement of the time precisely placed. If they want to put out DLC for this, they’re going to have to let you go to the fucking moon. Smuggling cheese across the Sea of Tranquility or something. And yet the sheer number of ports available to visit doesn’t count for THAT much because they’re all just glorified menu screens and half the ports in Africa use the same background with the same smarmy and conspicuously European type. managing the trading post. I found that the core gameplay loop was to complete your map, that is, point your ship inshore, drop the sails, and hope by Christ that you’ll stumble upon another settlement before your supplies run out and the crew have to start . collecting toenail clippings from others for nourishment. But as a core mechanic, mapping the world is probably the least interesting activity.
Exploring the uncharted regions of one of Earth’s harshest environments in what amounts to a pile of dead trees and cloth is a notoriously dull pastime. I understand there’s a limit to the thrill of nautical adventure that can be enacted when the camera is half a mile from the action, but perhaps my team of strangely suspicious aliens could have faced a little more pushback from the outposts. in remote or hostile countries. So you’d have to flatter them a bit before they agree to let you fill up on supplies and blood diamonds for half price? Or is it asking too much for a game that is already stretching itself out with too many features? I guess the naval combat element is well within the minimum expectations for this sort of thing; It’s quite useful splashing around with Playmobil toys in the bathtub, based on the use of awkward directional controls to bring the enemy within gun range. I wish I could make it a little clearer when your cannons are ready to fire. Again, the ships are pretty small on screen, so it’s not like we could squint and try to make out if the gunners reloaded the shot, primed the fuse, and finished their quick game of soggy biscuits.
But in addition to naval combat, there is also hand-to-hand combat when they tackle each other. Apparently. I mean, I’m pretty sure there is. It happened in a tutorial. And… that was the last time I saw him. It’s quite possible that he was hallucinating from the dubious grog. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make it happen after that. I probably should have paid more attention to the tutorial text, I guess, but with the localization issues it was like trying to ask directions from a scruffy person on a corner yelling about government listening devices in their urethra. Come to think of it, ship combat in general didn’t happen that much. I was ambushed by pirates just once while traversing the Gulf of Aden and in all other cases I had to opt to take bounty missions from outposts. Which are both painfully equal and joyously educational. Because you look them up and they’ll tell you “Go kill some pirates in the Ligurian Sea” so that’s a quick alternate tab and a trip to Google Maps before I can think of adding that to the itinerary. Now be honest with me, viewers, who knows where the Ligurian Sea is? Only you? Alright smart clogs, now YOU explain why the rewards office in Antwerp gave a shit.
I would summarize Sailing It was like a game full of misplaced effort. I keep going around the rocks and finding all this complex additional gameplay that doesn’t really bother me. Like land expeditions. You go to certain ports, and as long as you’ve done them enough favors and remember to wear a tie to the governor’s office, you can assemble a team and a bunch of supplies in a menu interface as welcoming as Hal’s tax return 9000 , but get past all of that and suddenly you’re basically in this other game that’s kind of based on The Curious Expedition where you explore a hex continent and come across random encounters and treasure. And in the meantime, I can reap the same benefit by sailing back and forth between Portugal and Sierra Leone a few times to restock all the cafes with exotic African sandwiches. So the land expeditions were another thing I did almost once, because it’s called the Sailing Age, not joking around in a prairie period. And now I feel bad for whoever had to sit down and write the entire random encounter text when they’d rather have been enjoying the sun or a set of soggy cookies. As for the theory that I automatically like games about ships, I’d say this is inconclusive proof, because ultimately Sailing Era scratched that itch and rearranged nautical-themed fridge magnets into a storm.
#Age #Navigation #Score
