Review anarchistica 2/5 · Feb 12, 2019
Single-player MMO with boring combat
I love Open World games. Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, Torment, Mass Effect, Dishonored, X3, Pillars of Eternity, Mount & Blade, you name it. Exploring a map, picking your fights, developing skills, improving equipment, questing, learning the lore - it's my favourite thing in video games. There's just one thing that can ruin it for me and that's …
I love Open World games. Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate, Torment, Mass Effect, Dishonored, X3, Pillars of Eternity, Mount & Blade, you name it. Exploring a map, picking your fights, developing skills, improving equipment, questing, learning the lore - it's my favourite thing in video games. There's just one thing that can ruin it for me and that's the gameplay. If i don't like what you actually do in a game, there's no salvaging it. And the gameplay in Tempest is awful.
About 80% of the combat consists of turning a ship with Q and E, waiting for your cannons to reload, waiting for the accuracy to hit the max and pressing Space. When you're on land or boarding it becomes a bare-bones third person fighting game where you just keep clicking until the enemy dies. It just isn't fun. Maybe if you could manually aim the cannons it would be fun. And if the close combat was at least as decent as that in Spellforce or Mount & Blade.
The game also lacks character. Early on you meet an old friend who joins your crew. You just click on him and he joins, there's no dialogue or anything. And at least he has a face, the rest of the crew is literally faceless and nameless. On top of that, the interface is truly terrible. It still has mobile elements like swiping, buttons aren't labelled so you just have to guess what they do, moving items is needlessly confusing and the same goes for assigning things.
I expected something like Risen 2 and instead got a boring single-player MMO. Such a shame.
