Tempest

We have all at some point dreamed of being a pirate, to sail the seven seas and plunder and party. There are a lot of games available for those who want to play out this nautical fantasy, and among that number we can now include the recently released {Tempest}. After a while in Early Access the time has come for Lion's Shade's pirate simulator to finally release, but unfortunately it leaves a lot to be desired.

{Tempest} is a pirate game with an open world where you take on the role of pirate captain. You can control your character freely in the three different regions that form the game world and if you get tired of being in the midst of other pirates you can easily change the view to mapping mode where you quickly can drag the mouse to set course for the nearest safe port.

The game has a little introduction and a training sequence, which is something that everyone should play through if they want to have a fair chance while sailing the three seas in the game. It starts with you inheriting your father's ship and after passing up a little fight with dad's rivals you encounter a Kraken who rather quickly sinks your ship. Equipped with a new ship and an appetite for revenge on the octopus that sunk your inheritance, you are set loose in the game world.

The first assignment you get is to gather your old crew who have spread out on the seas after the tentacle attack and subsequent shipwreck, but of course you can simply ignore it and sail away to any port and begin to carry out assignments for the faction that owns it. There are a total of eight different factions in the game, all of which are more or less at war with each other. You have the typical old " honest " pirates, trading empire, kingdoms, researchers and other empires fighting to be on top.

All factions have their own small bonuses. The pirates will repair your ship for free to a certain limit, and also share rusty cannonballs, for example. At the banks you can throw in your hard-earned gold coins and get a pretty nice weekly rate and traders have the cheapest prices on goods. Unfortunately, the missions you receive in harbours are not nearly as varied as the faction bonuses. It's basically just a handful of concepts where the text is changed to suit the client. In one faction you will carry ammunition from port to port and with another you patrol around and protect merchant ships from attack by someone else.

The design is monotonous and repetitive by nature and it would probably be easier to ignore if the rest of the game was better, which it unfortunately is not. Naval battles, which of course is the focus of a pirate game, will quite quickly become boring. It is important to choose the right ammunition, as there are cannonballs to harm enemy ships, another type for taking out of their sails and cluster bombs for eliminating the crew. Firing them is just a case of waiting for a meter to fill up, placing the blue cursor over the enemy ship and pushing off. A little special ammunition emerges later in the game, including gas grenades that harm the crew and firebombs that set the ship on fire, but all of them focus on damaging one of the three objectives: hull, sails and crew. A few whirlpools and sea monsters pop up every now and then to make things a little more interesting, but it still isn't enough.

<newpage>

By far the most frustrating part of the combat is the boarding of other ships. You can place your crew in position ahead of time, and depending on the position they will either shoot at the enemy crew, throw poison bottles or swing over and start chopping with swords. It sounds simple at first, but these diabolical mini-games are anything but. Health meters above the crew do not seem to mean anything at all as enemies standing with a sliver left can be hit and it pops a nice little "-7" but still remain alive, yet others with five health boxes get a little "-1" and lose most of their life force. You can order your crew to shoot at specific enemies on the other ship, but it doesn't make them do too much and they usually continue to shoot at random enemies. Apparently pirates in the eighteenth century were equipped with armour-piercing ammunition as well since taking cover behind debris seems to do very little.

If the swashbuckling combat can't save the game, you would probably like to decide how your pirate ship should look like. In addition to all of the different ships you can buy for looted money, or money that you earned through the classic "buy cheap, sell expensive" method, there are a whole bunch of different options and colour schemes you can decorate your ship with. Besides the cosmetic, there are also some mechanical things you can change as well as special weapons of a more magical variety. Among other things, you can evoke the tentacles from the ocean depths to damage and slow down enemy ships.

During the game, you also get access to some special crew. Generally speaking, they are ship's officers and give a bonus to the part of the ship they are assigned to, which is either the mast, where they can affect things like the speed and operation, above deck, where they provide bonuses during boarding, or below deck, where they may give bonuses to guns of various types. You will find special crews throughout the game as a reward of some quests, such as from the aforementioned first mission in the game where you have to get the band back together. Unfortunately, they are nothing more than small portraits, often nameless, with a small descriptive text and a bunch of numbers that show what the impact on the ship.

{Tempest} is not exactly a bad game, it just feels a little unfinished and some of the content is poor. Adding a couple of months, or even half a year, to the Early Access would have probably done ​​the game a lot of good, but many parts of the game's features need to be better explained. There is a nucleus of an entertaining game in {Tempest}, it's just that monotonous tasks, repetitive battles and aimless sailing to need to be waded through to get to the fun. Not exactly the pirate's life we'd been dreaming of.