Nautical Survival

Nautical Survival is a great roguelike. It's really different and I love the arcade-y feel of it. Some runs feel a bit unfair and harsh and that often leaves me feeling more like my run is dependent on luck rather than my own skill...which...I know it's a rogue like, but I want my game to be dependent on like a max of 20% luck. I want it to be mostly my skill that makes or breaks a run and on over half the runs here, I didn't feel that way. I did have one especially good run in and it felt so good. I'm excited to play more, but I'm not dying to play more.

it's a decent enough game but not something I could recommend to anyone. The Good: - The lighthouse idea is solid, and tying different crew member upgrades to its presence or lack thereof works really well no matter what build you have. - The repair shop is a great heal mechanic when you add it onto random health drops. I crashed into it a few times while trying to escape a mob, healed myself to full, only to get taken back down to half health because the mob caught up to me. It's a fun little risk/reward system that you can beat by learning how to steer better or getting speed/steering upgrades. - The boat drives like a boat, and the option to play in boat steering mode is a really cool feature. I would never use it, because I don't hate myself that much, but the option is neat. - The coin generator island is awesome. That's all. The Bad: - Build variety feels very repetitive, especially for the first few runs. There could be easier achievements/unlocks for the beginning of the game to allow for a couple more guns and crew members in subsequent runs, allowing new players to feel a slightly more satisfying sense of progression and adding to replayability. - The gun upgrade shop and the level up system feel like they should be inverted; level up weapons with XP and level up your ship with gold. - Weapons never feel powerful. This has nothing to do with the weapons themselves, it's the enemy responsiveness to being hit/killed: there is none. They just disappear. There needs to be some sort of feedback in combat, otherwise it doesn't feel like combat it feels like sweeping a floor with a gun. - The crewmate promotion system is so promising but falls so flat, I don't understand why the crew upgrades are randomized, all it adds is a sense of inconsistency to a set build for a short period of time. It's nice that you can continue to promote them after they hit their last upgrade, but it would nicer if you were incentivized to choose their level 5+ rewards, especially when all of them are just slightly more powerful than a boat level up reward. This could be fixed by having the 5+ reward increase in value each time it is selected, allowing the player to ignore certain boat upgrades in favor of crew member promotion. -Bosses just suck. Eel boss: go in a circle. Crab Boss: move to the side. Squid boss: stay away and shoot. Never once did I feel more pressure from a boss than I felt from normal mobs. Give them some more moves, maybe a projectile in phase 1 and then projectile and AoE attack in phase 2? It's no fun to fight something that won't attack until it's half dead, where's the sportsmanship in that? - Just get rid of the post office if you're gonna make a letter take up a cargo slot. You should be able to take as many letters as you have crew members, they can hold it in their hand we don't need a space the size of a dude for this piece of paper. The post office rewards you with miniscule gold for completing deliveries, but if you need to keep buying cargo slots to carry more letters to earn more gold then how much gold have you actually wasted on those cargo slots? Make it make sense. The Ugly: - The game. The game is ugly. The color palette is so bad and low contrast that it can be impossible to see what's onscreen once you get past wave 10. I can't tell you how many times a jellyfish stung me because it's a blue creature with a blue AoE in blue water. - Every gun weapon is the same weapon. There are damage differences and range differences, obviously, but every bullet is the same size yellow ball no matter which gun you have. This makes it so that the player can't distinguish which gun is doing what at any given moment, it's just a mess of yellow balls. - I couldn't tell you what a single crew member or boat or upgrade looks like. When the game isn't saturating your eyeballs with goldenrod and navy blue, it uses red and black to try to stand out. This would be fine, but none of the icons are big enough to really distinguish between them, it's like a 16 square pixel range or something. If someone who's been playing for an hour straight can't tell the difference between your upgrades just by looking, you need to rework the look of your upgrades. This goes for crew members as well, They're all tiny 16px sprites in a little box that's the same color as they are, impossible to distinguish any characteristics or features. -CHANGE THE MAP COLOR BETWEEN RUNS!!! These guys seem way too married to the look of this game, which is a shame because the look is bad. Honestly just making the water green and the islands brown for a level would add so much to replayability. Survivors-style games and their longevity rely on the dopamine release provided by the instant task/reward loop that things like slot machines provide. Vampire Survivors understands this, almost too well, and that's why you'll see people returning after months or years of not playing. Nautical Survival will not have any sort of longevity if it stays in its current state, it will fade into obscurity like all the other games around it, relegated to the Steam Bullet Hell sale page every few months only to be glossed over and passed by.

One of the best survivors variants ever made

One of the better survivor games out there. The arsenal of weapons feels very varied (even though I hate the anchor). The characters have very unique and interesting traits. I think the biggest innovation here is the islands system with an "expanding" arena. Instead of having a "shop" every round, you have a few types of islands which you can upgrade and visit at any time. The art is great and polished, I like that you can change the color scheme of the game. The gameplay itself feels snappy and responsive. Overall, highly recommend if you like arena shooters like Brotato

The most in depth survivor I played, you can get lost just delivering the mail around. takes a minute to get use to the high contrast look when trying to see every element out there but I got use to it a couple of runs. will play a lot more/

Nice and funny

A wonderful and visually unique entry into the "survivor" genre. The investment economy shake up with the islands feels nice and the level of power you can reach feels great without going overboard.

gg