Swords & Crossbones: An Epic Pirate Story

基本上就是一個手機遊戲拔掉內購之後的模樣 建設基地讓角色變強 跑主線解鎖新建築新角色 再建設基地讓角色變更強 再跑主線解鎖更多建築和更多角色 你可以航海、探索島嶼 但是各島嶼大同小異，探索了也沒什麼事可做 你可以建設你的海島 但是策略性極低，玩不出什麼花樣 劇情非常線性，選擇除了對話改變以外沒有任何影響 而且任務重複性極高 UI很粗糙 技能、裝備、戰鬥、建築管理，所有的UI都很不方便 我痛恨看到把良好概念執行得很糟糕的遊戲

Let me start by saying I enjoyed this game more than I expected. What follows is a somewhat spur-of-the-moment [strike]review[/strike] wall of text since I had just completed the game. Don't pay any attention to my game time though as I did a lot of idling. Still I probably got a good 20 hours out of the game. [b]TD:DR; A casual tactics RPG with city management sim elements. Good casual fun best served in bite-sized portions.[/b] Swords & Crossbones: An Epic Pirate Story is tactical battle rpg with city sim and exploration elements, packaged in a casual wrapping. The pixel aesthetic is easy on the eyes and works, and the character design unique, if somewhat unusual. First, the RPG parts. The combat system in this game is an old-school turn-based grid-based system reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea or any of a multitude of N64/NES/Gameboy tactics RPGs that used to be so common. Characters can move anywhere within their move radius, no matter how many steps they have to walk around to get there, and vertical layers can be traversed by jumping based on the character's jump stat. Since this is a pirate-themed game most maps include substatial amounts of water tiles -- these can be traversed freely but restrict using actions. On actions, each character can move and act in a turn, and actions include regular attacks, skills/spells/abilities, using items, or even swapping places with an enemy corpse that's blocking the character's passage. There are lots of skills and abilities to choose from and each character is themed slightly differently. Enemies are a mixed bag -- story enemies are mirrors of player characers so make for decent combat, but these encounters are limited to some two dozen or so boss battles. The majority of combat is in random encounters and generic battles, and those enemies only come in limited archetypes and some pallette-swaps so eventually fighting them becomes a grind. Thankfully there are ways of avoiding the random encounters so only island liberation battles against pirates are obligatory. If taken in small chunks the grind is manageable enough though. Story is cheesy and fun, an epic rescue and pursuit of revenge. It works well with the varied characters and original graphics design. I won't say much else because anything else will pretty much spoil what little of the story there is. It goes well with the game though. Aside from the combat the game has elements of city building/management. It comes in the form of building up a pirate island to provide houses for the crew, collect resources, craft better equipment, and build bigger ships. Eventually players can expand into tourism to entertain residents of liberated islands and provide a level of gold income to fund further expansion and upgrades. Needless to say, plans for each building have to be obtained by defeating enemies and clearing islands. Resources and items can also be found while exploring the seas and recovering sinking wrecks. It's all casual though, so no deadlines no rush. Time can be sped up at will up to x16 speed to simply wait for more resources when needed. Battles can be re-tried however many times needed -- getting the whole team knocked out simply sends the team back to the pirate island to train up and upgrade equipment. That pretty much sums up the game, in way too many words.

Swords & Crossbones almost got me. It's part TBS, but It also has you managing your island with it's houses, farms, decorations for tourism etc. It's a shallow slice of Tactics Ogre on the TBS front:some levels and skills, items etc. But not much character. The management sim aspect has a bit more going on but it's a pain navigating any portion of the game thanks to the UI. The art is cute for the most part, but the graphics are obtrusive to the gameplay and not pleasant; I found myself constantly fighting with the screen trying to click the right thing or not drag the map when building a road. The gameplay is competent, but the UI is horrid. On the story front, the writing really seems like they put a lot of effort into it, and they went for a comedic approach. These are both things I admire but I can't say any of itwas particularly great. The humor might appeal to some though. Then I noticed there were speed up buttons for the management sim portion, and auto buttons in battle. I found myself using them regularly, but as my resources accumulated and needed to be sold or I wanted to upgrade my buildings/characters I found myself wanting another button: there should be a way to automatically sell my resources to when they hit the cap, there should be a button to auto level my characters, and so on. That's when I realized this wasn't a game I actually enjoyed playing; this was a game giving me constant reward while I tried to avoid interacting with it. Is suffering from an identity crisis. It's too involved to be a clicker game and it's too clunky and bare to be a proper TBS/Management sim. When the highlight of a game is that I was able to avoid engaging with it, then something's sorely lacking. It would have been amazing 10+ years ago on a Gameboy advance, but on this platform, in 2018, it's just not worth the time.

Плюсы: + Музыка + Текст Минус, перевешивающий все плюсы: - Управление и скорость. Чтобы атаковать врага базовой атакой (и это еще без движения), надо сделать четыре клика мышкой: нажать "Действие", выбрать "Атака", указать цель, подтвердить удар. С клавиатуры (если я не пропустил ничего), можно сделать только один из этих четырех шагов, остальные - извольте водить мышкой. Передвижение на три клетки занимает три секунды: персонаж медленно и неторопливо прыгает по каждой клетке по несколько шагов. Ну реалистичная скорость ходьбы, да. Спасибо за введение реализма именно там, где он только раздражает. В 1998 году была бы знаменитая игра. Но для избалованного юзабилити современного геймера - увы. Разве что на автобой ставить все бои и идти заниматься чем-нибудь другим.

lazy mobile port. no volume settings, only toggles, repetitive music. windowed mode needs a full restart. can't access settings (what settings?) anywhere outside the main menu, can't even turn off music if it's getting on your nerves, and it will long before the intro is over. and it crashes all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time. horrible ui and controls. only left click, as if you're still on your phone, meaning no tooltips and multiple clicks to do anything and everything, including something as simple as repeatedly attacking an enemy or checking what an item is. the wheel zooms in/out at least but can't make the camera sit still during combat, keeps centering on whatever's going on. and I was wondering why I couldn't upgrade anything when I had the necessary resources. there's a decoration requirement too but it didn't display correctly for me. my guess is the game uses the operating system's text scaling settings, which simply breaks the ui. well done. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3316020311 no difficulty settings, save slots only serve as separate player profiles. autosaves happen whenever and when you quit, a manual save, stored separately, can be forced by clicking an icon. can't save during combat. can't pause either. combat is turn-based, whatever, and there's seemingly no passage of time, no days, seasons or anything, but buildings take time to build and resources are constantly being gathered, to the point of running out of storage space. speeding up is possible, generously up to 16x, but again, can't pause. if excess stock got sold automatically, it'd be fine, you don't want to pause an idler either, which this partly is. on the upside: the speed-up button gets rid of slow character movement in battles and there's an auto-battle option, can be enabled/disabled at will to reduce tedium but a quick auto-resolve option would've been good too (and if the harpooner stopped using his special attack to pull an exploding barrel to damage himself). instant and silent text display, can't believe they didn't go with annoying gibberish and typewriter effect. and all of one person's text is shown at once, don't have to click 15 times for somebody to finish what they want to say. infantile as it is, I also didn't mind the writing. paying for side-quests, repeatable or otherwise, is weird, even if you get more as a reward. and why can only the main resources be bought and sold? for petty cash too, nothing substantial, same for food and rare metal. I had hundreds of carrots, spinach and other ♥♥♥♥ that couldn't be used for crafting until much later, could've made some money until then. crafting is ♥♥♥♥ too. can't filter, sort, compare items or queue orders, gotta wait for one thing to get made, often with multiple breaks while the worker goes to sleep. sailing only uncovers water tiles and distance is limited by the ship's food capacity. fair enough and don't worry about coming back, happens automatically at no cost when food runs out. reaching new land is not good enough, gotta find the pre-built harbor, can only disembark there. placing roads is extra finicky and can mess up the map, leaving weird-looking tiles here and there, further increasing the bugginess factor. not to mention roads converted to bridges can only go so far into water, making them ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ piers, not bridges. and every time I wanted to remove some ill-placed tiles, the game crashed. but as I said above, it crashes regardless. there's some good stuff here, greatly outweighed by the bad.

Es un buen juego para los amantes de los rpg tacticos simples y los que buscan juegos de tematica pirata, la historia tiene un toque comico bastante raro xD, no obstante se hubiera agradecido que hubieran atajos de teclado para que los combates fueran menos pesados y espero que se tenga en cuenta si hay una segunda parte.

Игра норм мне поравилась)))

A retro pixel iso turn based strategy pirate simulator. The dialogue in the game is high school level remedial English class, but that's not the real problem (some people might like that) The pixel graphics are painful to look at (it's 2018 now). The gameplay is needlessly clunky and unintuitive. This is a shame because it looks like a lot of work went into some aspects of the game which might have made it fun if not for these obstacles. Perhaps they'll do a remake with real graphics and polished gameplay. Unfortunately for this one, there's better piracy/simulation games. There's better TBS games. There's no reason to recommend this.

Несложная пиксельная пошаговая игрушка, перевод чуть кривоват, да, но местами это даже мило. Да как и сама игра: милые персонажи, сюжет и диалоги - ми-ло-та Так что, малышьки, если вы купили эту игру (лучше по скидке, 100+ рэ это переплатить), готовьтесь мечевать! Жмите на бутон игры и не выходите "без должной причины"

First of all... I don't write reviews of games I've played on here, and I've played some really good games on Steam, some of them really good SRPGs. So why did I write a review of this one? I mean, it's not like combat is anything to write home about. Anyone expecting the in-depth use of positioning and teamwork from the likes of XCOM or Shadowrun will be sorely disappointed. There's clearly stuff that the developers wanted to do to make it interesting, but you get into combat more because you have to progress than anything else. The music isn't that great either, especially when it loops around so much. Everything you've read about the UI being garbage? Completely true. As for upgrading equipment... well, this is the first game where I've been able to break the in-game economy just by having it running while I go have dinner. So why am I giving a POSITIVE review for a RPG that has mediocre combat, annoying music and upgrades that are way too easy to get? Well... it's because everything else is so charming that it makes up for it. The art design uses pixel art in a way that manages to combine cute and ugly in a way that's kinda neat. The townbuilding mechanics have enough weight to them that I ended up basically making half the island into a weird nature preserve with lots of monkeys with a tree each to climb. The sea exploration minigame is simple yet raises genuine tension with a great risk-reward balance. And the writing... I sometimes rewatch a now-defunct YouTube LP series called Let's Drown Out. It's great, you should go watch it. Anyway, sometimes they answered questions from their viewers, and one of those was "Have you ever played a game where the writing made you want to keep playing?". I don't believe they could find an example, but I can: Swords & Crossbones. There's only a handful of SRPGs that have tried to be funny - the subgenre tends to be rather serious in tone by default, and games that try and be comedic are usually more Sunset Overdrive than Hitchiker's Guide. However, there is something about this game's writing that has what I can only describe as "endearingly goofy". There's a lot of leaning on the fourth wall, but it never breaks it; the characters are all distinct without becoming one-note; there are moments of genuine warmth, especially near the end. I've spent over two DAYS playing this game (which it turns out is probably five times as long as most people have played it) and it was purely to find out how the story ended) and it was just to see how the story ended. Trust me, you'll want to do the same. Well, maybe not spending 50+ hours on it, but you know what I mean. Sometimes, it's okay for a game to be good, not great. That's not damning with faint praise, it's just a solid recommendation. But yeah, get it in a sale or something. And remember to turn off music and put on a podcast/audiobook/playlist of much better piratey music... THEN you can get your swordy time on.