Here Be Dragons

Finally, where are the dragons?

The game is OK, but gets tedious quickly. The battles are unbalanced and depend on randomness way too much. The AI is likewise random. The story tries to be cute and funny, but it too becomes tedious very quickly. I bought it when it was about $2.50 and frankly that is about its worth.

Ultimately I think this game is mostly fine, but nothing good about it stands out, and playing it is a little annoying. For me, this is worse than being a bad game with a few good elements,but everyone engages with games differently, so you might not feel the same. Here Be Dragons' core concept is that it's a dice placement board game simulating naval battles. Placing higher dice has more aggressive effects, but placing a high sum of dice causes you to act second in the initiative order. If you don't place dice, you take damage. This creates kind of a neat push-and-pull in theory, where you're going for slow high damage on some turns and fast defenses on others, but the balance on the game isn't loose enough to let you play around. It's built more like a puzzle game, but a puzzle game where you routinely need to get certain combinations of dice. Which means one of the strongest moves you can make is just to restart a level and get a different initial roll. There are some *very* light rpg elements, where you can upgrade your ships between maps, but only during certain short strings of levels. After the string is done, the upgrades reset. Moreover, you switch between characters and abilities after every string, and a lot of the characters don't feel great to use. It's not *too* hard, but sometimes the rng just hands you a garbage starting roll, or it serves the enemy exactly the dice they need on a round where they have the initiative and they instantly focus down one of your ships, and there's no incentive not to immediately restart the level. The art is solid, and the creatures look fun and detailed and menacing, but the writing did not land with me. It's a picaresque about bad people plundering and murdering and starting wars with the ocean, but it uses this setup to... quote Monty Python jokes. Hey, man. Do you remember the Knights Who Say Ni? Yeah, that's SO funny. I'm gonna randomly say Ni and you're gonna laugh and we're all gonna laugh. Over and over and over again. It feels stale and uninspired in a way that the rest of the game isn't. I think as a board game, where you're physically interacting with the dice and paging through the rulebook and maybe there's pvp, this would be fun. As-is, it felt more frustrating than enjoyable. If you like dice placement games and puzzle games and want to turn your brain off a bit, it's probably not a bad pick on sale. But if you were hoping for a more robust strategy rpg like I was, this ain't that.

The dialogue is well written and funny but the gameplay is incredibly dull. I was hoping for additional abilities and more interesting enemies but after five or six rounds there was nothing interesting happening. It's possible it gets a lot better after a couple hours but from what I could tell the game is missing some key gameplay flairs it needs to keep things interesting.

Great tiny game. The story is quirky with tons of pop references. The gameplay stays fresh throughout, with each chapter introducing a few new themes and abilities. Some reviews complain about a lack of progression, but I would argue that the refresh with each chapter is what works so well for this game. It plays into the story. It prevents falling into a strategic rot. It creates novelty to each puzzle. Some chapters I enjoyed more than others. Fog is easy to cheat, and ghost ships are hard to control.

Гра досить давно зачепила своїм візуальним стилем, але я все відкладав її купівлю через змішані відгуки. Хоч вважаю правильнішим прислухатись до власних думок і бажань, проте Here Be Dragons цілком заслуговує того, що про неї пишуть. 6/10 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3798496500 Перші кампанії 6-7 було дійсно цікаво: пояснювали і додавали механіки, розважали кумедні діалоги, постійно з'являлись нові вороги, були сподівання на потужні білди кораблів. Але у другій половині гри рандом почав руйнувати будь-яку прокачку та очікування. Могло бути так, що ти йдеш у захист від атак, а вороги починають тебе бити отрутою(статусом) чи здібностями(вони ігнорують захист). 9 кампанія цьому підтвердження, коли перемагаєш противників шкодою від непотрібних їм кубів. Замість неї я б одразу поставив останнє плавання та закінчив гру, бо вже було відчуття затягнутості. Тому гру варто розглядати, як пазл, підбірку ситуацій з яких треба виплисти живим. І мати достатньо нервів чи резист до реролів/перезавантажень. Враховуючи ціну зі знижкою, на неї можна витратити трохи часу.

Simple game, best to get it on a sale (if -75% then the cost is 2,43€). I played about 4 hours and then I got bored. But 4 hours for 2,43€ is a great bargain.