Sailing Era – Zero Punctuation

Sailing Era is a Chinese game. This comes across as a Japanese game, but with a hint of hopeless panic in the characters’ eyes as they fear being made disappear by the government. The hint was that the damn thing was Chinese by default and I had to skim through the menus trying to educate myself on guessing the way to the language options. May be: It’s as localized as Arctic American Tourist. Literally, it reads like it’s been ransacked in a back alley by Google Translate. and to follow different characters around the world in a wonderful age of discovery. Get together and find common ground in how much you hate Europeans.

Sailing Era is both wildly ambitious and uncomfortably simplistic. It sets out to create a playground of all seas and all continents, systematically defogging all seas and all continents, and accurately locating all major ports and settlements of the age. If they want DLC out for this they have to make you go to the fucking moon. Still, the number of ports you can visit doesn’t really matter. Because they’re all glorified menu screens, half the African ports use the exact same backgrounds, and the exact same smarmy, conspicuously European-looking dude assigned to a trading post. The central gameplay loop is filling in the map: pointing the ship to the shoreline, lowering the sails, and blundering into another settlement before supplies run out and the crew has to depart. It turns out that it consists of wishing for Harvest each other’s toenail clippings for nutrition. But charting the world as a core mechanic is probably the least interesting activity.

Exploring the uncharted territories of one of the most hostile environments on earth, equivalent to piles of dead wood and cloth, is notoriously tedious pastime. I understand that there are limits to the excitement of a nautical adventure that can be portrayed when the camera is half a mile above the action, but perhaps a crew of suspected alien freaks could be in a remote or hostile country. outpost? So should we butter them up a bit before we fill up our supplies and agree to half-price blood diamonds? Or are we asking too much from a game that’s already pretty superficially spread out to offer too much functionality? I think it’s in the range of It’s useful enough to splatter Playmobil toys in a bathtub based on using awkward steering controls to put enemies in cannon range. I wish I could. Again, the ship is so small on screen that you’ll have to squint to see if the gunner has reloaded a shot, primed the fuse, and finished a quick game of soggy biscuits I can not do it.

However, there is not only combat on ships, but also hand-to-hand combat when boarding each other. Face up. I mean, I’m sure there is. It happened in a tutorial. And… that was the last I saw. It’s entirely possible that he was hallucinating from the dangerous grog. After that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make it happen. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the tutorial text. Come to think of it, the ship battle didn’t come out much overall. Only once have I been ambushed by pirates while crossing the Gulf of Aden, and on all other occasions I have had to come to terms with it by taking a bounty mission from an outpost. It’s the same, fun and educational. Look them up and they say “go kill pirates in the Ligurian Sea”, so I Alt-Tab to Google Maps before I even think about adding it to my itinerary. Dear viewers, do you honestly know where the Ligurian Sea is off the top of your head? Well clever clogs, explain why the Bounty Office in Antwerp gave a shit about it.

Summarize Sailing Era as a game full of misguided effort. I keep flipping rocks and finding all this complicated extra gameplay I can’t really care about. Like a land expedition. You go to a specific port and collect a team and a bunch of supplies with a menu interface that’s as welcoming as a Hal 9000 tax return, as long as you do enough goodwill and don’t forget to wear a tie to the governor’s office You can, but once you get past it all, you’re suddenly a bit away from The Curious Expedition, where you’re basically in this whole other game, exploring a hex continent full of random encounters and treasure. In the meantime, I can make just as much profit by flying back and forth between Portugal and Sierra Leone a few times to restock every cafe with exotic African sandwiches. It was another thing that I did once. Because it was called the age of sailing, not the age of fussing pastures. And now I feel bad for someone who had to sit down and write every random encounter text while enjoying a game of sunbathing and soggy biscuits. For the theory of liking, we call this the definitive test.