Nantucket

The general gameplay loop is boring. There's a lot of dead air moving from place to place, so much so I actually took out my phone during this. Sometimes you get an event to break up the pace which come in two flavors; a combat encounter and an event with mild consequences. The former is pretty bland. Combat is entirely based on RNG and you don't have any means to really manipulate it beyond out stat checking failures. You can get unique skills when you level up but since your ability to use them is inconsistent they're usually not that useful and the thought process in battle is usually going after whoever you can one shot in one turn. The game is transparent on the actions your enemy takes so sometimes you *might* decide to target someone else if you can tell they're going for the dodge, but man the numbers are so often on your side it doesn't matter. It's either that or you get rng screwed. The choices are repetitive with the common dichotomy being either you don't want to hurt your crew's morale or have your crewmates adopt negative traits. The issue here is that morale is such an after thought, it's far too easy to keep it high through various perks and just maintaining resource stability. The consequences of having it low is also negligible, in all my time playing I can't remember it having any major influence on how it affected my play. So any time these choices pop up there's little reason to not go for the choices that give you benefits while causing a slight decrease in morale. Other times you get choices based on needing to dispose of resources but what you're forced to sacrifice is so miniscule it never deters your current path or forces you to play differently, even in the early game. Sometimes the decision is a bit more complex than this but in every case the most optimal and beneficial decision is so obvious that you're never given incentive to not go for that choice, which makes this system shallow and actually a bit aggravating given how frequently it pops up. As an ironman game I just do not think it's fun. It’s too easy to get to a point where you stabilize your resources and any drawbacks you get through poor luck or bad decisions is easy to negate through just going to the nearest port and hiring a new crewmate. This only makes the game more tedious because it means you have to build up more crewmates again and the decision making is far too obvious and easy. There's not enough individuality on any sailor to make losing them a problem and you also such a small crew size that replacing them is a trivial cost. The most flexibility an iron man run demands of you is entirely just patience, and even in those conditions it's too easy to snowball anyway. At best it may make you more wary of risky decisions early game but I don't exactly think that choosing not to engage with its gameplay is a more exciting alternative. You never have to pay attention to the map and anything that slows you down only serves to slow down the pace of its gameplay loop. Rarely are resources ever a problem given how tightly connected the trade docks are and how events barely hurt you. There's no incentive to explore the darkened out sections of the map as there’s nothing to actually discover in them. You may have some areas that you can stop and fish for, but why bother when the quests and upgrades give you incentive to move around anyway and are more rewarding? Your incentive of going anywhere on the map comes down to two things - quests and upgrades. I think these compliment each other well as you need to go between ports to get new upgrades and complete quests so there's never a reason to not be moving. But the thing is every region is functionally the same aside from not having specific functions (shipbuilding, quests, etc), they may have differing prices on occasion but since the game expects you to be moving all the time for other things you never have any reason to think about the optimal routing for pricing. It's also so blandly devoid of politics, this era of maritime venturing was full of competitive cutthroat policies by competing governments but yet every region is functionally neutral to each other? The game gives you a sense of time passing and the newspaper depicting real historical events is novel but it loses its luster because why does any of that ever matter to you? The "challenge" expansion opens up the map of the entire world but all this does is add two new ports and more tedium. This is especially insulting considering they could have expanded the cultural framing so much here. I get there's a need to balance ports and requiring some level of distance between them but even then why not have ports in southern Arabia, east Africa, or somewhere in western North America? It gets worse how the port in the British Raj only gives you British sailors despite British people being a minority there and also just disregarding how important the existence of Lascars were in this era. What is the point of this expansion if we're not exploring more cultural niches? At best you have a few other ships doing quests and what not but the framing for them being rivals is non-existant and they don't do much to change your game plan anyway. The narrative is basically a chopped down version of Moby ♥♥♥♥ without really capturing the nuances of it. The narrative is so devoid of personality, it feels like I'm reading a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ abridged version of the sparknotes article on Moby ♥♥♥♥. I think its visual style is fine enough, but it feels like everything is blandly written and pragmatically conveyed that it lacks any real personality to make you care about anything. Even the occasional cutscenes feel like a nothing burger, just two sentences and admittedly cool looking drawing to reiterate what you just did in the narrative. The main campaign does at least give incentive to create specific unique scenarios that spice up its gameplay on occassion but never once do they force you to play any differently than how you usually do with the sole exception being the final boss. The penultimate battle with Moby ♥♥♥♥ is some of the dumbest ♥♥♥♥ I’ve ever experienced in a game. In order to even hurt him you have to equip an item that removes status effects on an enemy. This is all fine and dandy, but the caveat here is whether or not you can trigger that item skill is entirely rng. The boss could wipe your entire crew before you get the chance and it makes the entire boss such an obnoxious pursuit of replaying it until you get lucky, and god forbid the crewmate who has the item dies in the process because then you have to wait until he kills your whole crew before you can try again. Also hope that when the boss submerges to regain his invulnerability you can use the spear again if you're lucky! It doesn't take too long to get lucky enough to win this fight but it's so funny that they needed such a dumb mechanic reliant on RNG to even present a barrier to you, which to me is an indictment of how shallow this game is. If you want a 19th century sailing sim there's so many better titles you could pick up other than this. Literally just play the Uncharted Waters series and you'll have more enjoyment out of that than this. Hell, even Sid Meier's Pirates, which I'm also critical of, has far more going on with it than what this game does. I think this sticks out for having a unique vibe and aesthetic but it just does everything so poorly and blandly I can't recommend this to anyone.

An absolute must play if you're into the whaling time period. A fun, yet fairly difficult game, about managing your crew as you grow a whaling ship to conquer Moby ♥♥♥♥. The combat has a high-ish difficulty floor, as the player has to become very used to having a very low action economy compared to their enemies. The nice artstyle and shanties in the background make for a very fun experience. The game plays like map and resource section of Mount and Blade, so incredibly fun if you are into that style of game. Absolutely loved it

Unique and challenging.

A wonderful experience! The Italian made Nantucket is a naval strategy game inspired by Melville’s novel Moby ♥♥♥♥. The protagonist Ishmael remains as such, but the player can recruit all sorts of sailors across the world, managing his crew, his cargo, his journeys, and of course his encounters, that in this game are played with dice. The gameplay formula works sublimely; it is nice to have a pirate-like game where the scope is not to board ships but rather to trade and hunt wild beasts. Playing Nantucket was very satisfying and rewarding, both the story mode and the free roaming!

ci sto tornando nel 2025, gioco bello, atmosferico, fatto con passione

5/10

great game i love sperm