Nautical Survival

Fun for a short time, but seems really repetitive, you get screwed up by rng island spawn locations/ rng weapons available,

it's a decent enough game but not something I could recommend to anyone. The Good: - The lighthouse idea is solid, and tying different crew member upgrades to its presence or lack thereof works really well no matter what build you have. - The repair shop is a great heal mechanic when you add it onto random health drops. I crashed into it a few times while trying to escape a mob, healed myself to full, only to get taken back down to half health because the mob caught up to me. It's a fun little risk/reward system that you can beat by learning how to steer better or getting speed/steering upgrades. - The boat drives like a boat, and the option to play in boat steering mode is a really cool feature. I would never use it, because I don't hate myself that much, but the option is neat. - The coin generator island is awesome. That's all. The Bad: - Build variety feels very repetitive, especially for the first few runs. There could be easier achievements/unlocks for the beginning of the game to allow for a couple more guns and crew members in subsequent runs, allowing new players to feel a slightly more satisfying sense of progression and adding to replayability. - The gun upgrade shop and the level up system feel like they should be inverted; level up weapons with XP and level up your ship with gold. - Weapons never feel powerful. This has nothing to do with the weapons themselves, it's the enemy responsiveness to being hit/killed: there is none. They just disappear. There needs to be some sort of feedback in combat, otherwise it doesn't feel like combat it feels like sweeping a floor with a gun. - The crewmate promotion system is so promising but falls so flat, I don't understand why the crew upgrades are randomized, all it adds is a sense of inconsistency to a set build for a short period of time. It's nice that you can continue to promote them after they hit their last upgrade, but it would nicer if you were incentivized to choose their level 5+ rewards, especially when all of them are just slightly more powerful than a boat level up reward. This could be fixed by having the 5+ reward increase in value each time it is selected, allowing the player to ignore certain boat upgrades in favor of crew member promotion. -Bosses just suck. Eel boss: go in a circle. Crab Boss: move to the side. Squid boss: stay away and shoot. Never once did I feel more pressure from a boss than I felt from normal mobs. Give them some more moves, maybe a projectile in phase 1 and then projectile and AoE attack in phase 2? It's no fun to fight something that won't attack until it's half dead, where's the sportsmanship in that? - Just get rid of the post office if you're gonna make a letter take up a cargo slot. You should be able to take as many letters as you have crew members, they can hold it in their hand we don't need a space the size of a dude for this piece of paper. The post office rewards you with miniscule gold for completing deliveries, but if you need to keep buying cargo slots to carry more letters to earn more gold then how much gold have you actually wasted on those cargo slots? Make it make sense. The Ugly: - The game. The game is ugly. The color palette is so bad and low contrast that it can be impossible to see what's onscreen once you get past wave 10. I can't tell you how many times a jellyfish stung me because it's a blue creature with a blue AoE in blue water. - Every gun weapon is the same weapon. There are damage differences and range differences, obviously, but every bullet is the same size yellow ball no matter which gun you have. This makes it so that the player can't distinguish which gun is doing what at any given moment, it's just a mess of yellow balls. - I couldn't tell you what a single crew member or boat or upgrade looks like. When the game isn't saturating your eyeballs with goldenrod and navy blue, it uses red and black to try to stand out. This would be fine, but none of the icons are big enough to really disti…

Really very pleasant survivor. I enjoy the micromanagement of time, and on-the-fly routing that the gameplay loop encourages. It's got a very relaxing vibe to it as well.