Abandon Ship: Review

The history of the creation of Abandon Ship, sources of inspiration and aspirations of developers from the Friv5Online studio Fireblade Software, we have already told in detail in our preview. The bottom line is that this is a "roguelike" in the manner of FTL: Faster Than Light , just not about space, but about sailing ships and salty sea romance. The authors promised a lot of tasty things, but one of the promises was definitely not kept - the game was released not in 2017, but two years later. What about the rest of the promises and their real implementation?

So, in Abandon Ship, the ship control process is really implemented in sufficient detail. On the global map, we go into ports, and there we tumble into taverns, where we hire crew members - gunners, navigators, doctors, sailors, boarding soldiers, and so on. Everyone, of course, is strong in their own business, and each one is more and more pumped as he progresses.

During naval battles, we must closely monitor what is happening, reacting in time to a changing situation. Initially, your sailors are assigned to their posts - someone is at the helm, and someone is loading the cannons. Moreover, you can turn on automatic shooting. But if enemy shells damaged parts of your ship or caused a fire, then you will have to personally send your people to repair them or fill them with water. Or pump out water from the hold. Or get up to the winch and pick up a comrade who fell overboard. And no one loads the guns at this time ...

You also need to control the distance to the target - either move away and stay away in order to accumulate a special scale of maneuvers and try to escape, or, conversely, approach each other for ramming and boarding, during which you also need to control your fighters. Moreover, before the collision itself, you need to press a special button in time and pass the stability check - if you do not have time, then your sailors will fall on the deck.

The speed with which your charges get back on their feet after such falls, repair, charge, twist the winch and climb aboard from the water depends on their personal parameters. And this is also influenced by severe injuries that can overtake this or that sailor during an adventure. In this case, he, like in Darkest Dungeon, will receive some kind of permanent fine - and this sore will have to be removed for money from the pharmacist.

By the way, in the port you can look into the prison and choose one of the criminals to join your team - they cost much cheaper, but everyone has a lot of such bad performance penalties. One of them is called "Incorrigible" - people with this trait cannot be turned over at the port to the authorities in order to lower their wanted rating, which increases if, for example, you attack trade caravans.

Everything related to the ship itself has been implemented in sufficient detail. In the port at the shipyard, you can repair the current or buy a new ship - all these brigs and sloops differ in the strength of the hull, the number of places in the warehouse and the maximum number of crew members. There we also improve parts of the ship (increase the strength of the hull, resistance to fire, the efficiency of repairs, etc.) and buy important upgrades - for example, install an automatic winch, harpoons, pumps for pumping water or spikes in order to inflict more damage on an enemy ship when boarding. There is even an analogue of an icebreaker, which we put on the bow of the ship.

Finally, you need to buy advanced guns from the shipyard. Knippels, buckshot, chain or well-aimed cannonballs, mortars, destroyers - all types of weapons differ in the distance at which they are most effective, the speed of reloading, as well as the damage done to the hull, crew and parts of the ship. There are also special guns that can stun, strike with lightning, or even temporarily turn an enemy sailor into a berserker attacking their own.

After leaving the port, we set off to carry out story tasks and travel across the global map, which is divided into different regions - each of them has its own enemies, ports, forts and random events. The outcome of the latter affects the morale of the crew, may or may not lead to injury to one of the sailors, bring resources or, conversely, reduce them. Moreover, in many cases, you need to go through a certain number of such events in order for the gates to open and we were allowed to enter another location.

Regions differ in weather conditions. Somewhere it is raining - there, in battle, weapons that strike with lightning are especially effective. There is a storm somewhere - during the battles, stability checks of the crew members will often be carried out. And somewhere around there are icebergs and ice floes, which gradually damage the hull in fights.

In many regions, power belongs to pirates or members of the cult of the local Cthulhu (or Dagon, something like that), with whom we fight according to the plot. To be able to use local ports, you need to sink a certain number of important ships, destroy a couple of forts, and then defeat the boss.

As I said, there are also options to attack trade routes or, conversely, destroy pirates in order to get discounts at the port. Except that the trading system is absent as a class - it will not work to buy sugar and coffee somewhere in order to sell them in another port.

In general, as you can see, almost everything seems to be in place and is implemented in great detail. But the developers clearly did not manage to correctly balance the complexity in the release version. In the preview, we wrote that in Abandon Ship every battle will be like the last one and in general it will be hardcore.

However, at least in the first half of the game on normal and even on hard difficulty levels, I did not experience any particular difficulties. Only a couple of times I had to escape from the battle - when the enemy came in from the wrong side on which my sailors with the main weapons were located by default. The formation, by the way, is allowed to be saved and changed at any time outside the battles.

Once I was sunk by a kraken - not the one in the prologue, but the second, much more powerful. And even then I calmly won, when I came on a date with him with a completely repaired hull and replaced one gun. I also had to use the rescue boat exactly once to get to the nearest port with a certain chance and buy a new ship there.

The fact is that, firstly, money and provisions are accumulated quickly, while food is spent mainly only when moving between locations. Moreover, in each port, the explorer's guild gives a lot of money just for opening the entire map of the region. As a result, we quickly upgrade the ship to the full, and there is no point in buying a new one - at all shipyards they offer only a sloop with a slightly thicker hull. Then the money has nowhere to go.

And in battles, one tactic works perfectly - to get close as quickly as possible and take the enemy on board. And then we highlight our sailors with a frame and set them in turn on one enemy after another, not forgetting to take the wounded out of the battle in time and send them to the altar for treatment. In this way, I defeated even the superior forces of the opponent, when the enemy eight or nine were against my six. It is even better to fire at the enemy with buckshot when approaching. For some reason, the enemies themselves did not even try to board me.

In the later stages of the game, the difficulty, on the contrary, can increase sharply and unbalanced. But the recipe for victory itself will remain the same.

The situation is made worse by a rather meager set of random events. You will be constantly asked whether to help the craft guild ship and rescue it from pirates or sail by; stand up for a weaker ship or agree with the pirates and receive a reward for your non-interference; send a rescue boat to pick up drowning people or not; check what kind of empty ship is drifting there, or continue your journey out of harm's way.

As a result, after a while, all this is so annoying that you want to skip battles and "random" events in order to just float through the plot. History is really what can hold interest in what is happening. As I said, it revolves around a confrontation with a mysterious cult of which our captain was once a member. There are also a couple of shorter scripts, including one for the cult.

During Early Access, players often complained about the high difficulty of the game - perhaps the authors went to the other extreme. In any case, they have not yet managed to establish a balance - I'm talking about normal and hard difficulty levels. Monotony and imbalance are among the most common sins of roguelikes, and the authors of Abandon Ship , unfortunately, did not escape them. This is all the more annoying because an interesting mechanic is implemented here, and the game looks just gorgeous (the weather effects were especially successful). It remains to either immediately twist the difficulty up to the "Hardcore" level, or wait for patches that will bring balance to life in all modes and add new random events. In the hope of this, I will still put "Commendable" - the potential of the game is really powerful, and there are very few such sea adventures on the market now.

Pros: the atmosphere of real sea romance; interesting story; sophisticated and multifaceted gameplay; gorgeous picture.

Cons: The imbalance in difficulty and the paucity of random events lead to the fact that the game becomes monotonous - at least at normal and hard difficulty levels.