Abandon Ship

An overall interesting design in this genre, and the first few hours will be pretty fun. However you'll find the repetition sets in rather quickly, along with a mostly lifeless world. Writers have done their best to create interesting scenarios and build a lovecraft inspired setting, but often times it's fairly disjointed. While not an absolutely inspiring game, there's enjoyment to be had still, but it's fairly limiting. I would recommend the game at a budget price, but not neccessarily at full.

Abandon Ship is a FREE mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as a PAID PRODUCT, as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. This mobile app is, admittedly, a bit deeper than your average Candy Crush/Angry Birds/Flappy Bird ripoff that we often get shoved onto Steam, and that's laudable, but there's obvious compromises baked into the core of this game, aimed at making sure it's suitable for iPhones, and that harms the experience on PC. And in this case it's a shame because the industry has struggled for decades to come up with a game as good as Sid Meier's "Pirates!", and I feel this was an attempt to connect that genre with the exhumed and much abused corpse of HP Lovecraft... yep, we're once more making public domain worse by ripping off someone else's creative design and narrative. So, you've got your sailboat, and you sail around, and unlike Pirates!, core game loops work out more like Faster Than Light (FTL) platespinning where you tap your iPhone screen to send your ships crew on various busy work jobs like firing cannons, patching holes in your boat, that kind of thing. And I guess from that kind of derivative, mobile oriented gameplay, you can kind of see that what little bespoke narrative is drowned out (using that metaphor because this is a game about sailing) by endless, repetitive game loops that become tedious almost immediately. From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The game features simple, retro looking 3D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. It doesn't look terrible, but this is a 7 year old game that looks like it's 17 years old, and that's not delivering the kind of visual fidelity that PC gamers expect for the AAA pricing on this mobile app. The game features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the game, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the game doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content. Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone. These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Let's talk about price and the value this represents for us gamers. Should you buy this mobile app? Is it among the best the Steam catalogue has to offer? Yet again, we've caught a greedy mobile developer trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $25 USD, on app stores? Free for mobile peasants. PC gamers have to pay for a free mobile app. Disgusting. Mobile devs need to learn PC gamers aren't gullible or here to be scammed. Charging money on Steam for something you can get for free on mobile app stores isn't an acceptable business model, it's a directly unethical attempt to scam PC gamers who might not be aware they could get this mobile app for free. Because this can be played free on mobile phones, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend. Even if you do still want to play this, go play it on your phone where it's free. It costs money here, and that's not okay. That's right... they want [i]$25 USD for a FREE mobile app!!![/i] Just who do they think we are?