#Maelstrom game best ship series

Which isn’t a knock on the PVP system itself, it just needs something more to keep you coming back. Yet, having played some 14 hours before growing tired of the constant PVP battles, I cannot help but feel that a fully PVE game mode was a missed opportunity. Without those unexpected moments, Maelstrom would likely have just descended into a bland battle royale game at sea. Even despite having better naval gameplay than a lot of modern games I’ve experienced, there’s still a repetitiveness to it that would have worn you down eventually. Despite the delightful art on the ships themselves, there’s an uninspiring blandness on the game's ocean maps. The element of monsters is an important addition to keep the game feeling as fresh as it does in the beginning. I didn’t know too much about Maelstrom before I went into this review, so it came as quite the surprise when a Leviathan appeared from beneath the waves to give me the ol’ Titanic treatment. This becomes clear, not only due to the unique ship designs, but because of what lays below the surface too. Maelstrom leans heavily into the fantasy element of the ocean. The second aspect that keeps Maelstrom ticking are its monsters. I’m not saying you need to be Horatio Nelson to have any chance in Maelstrom, but you won’t get away with simply floating alongside someone and bombarding them with canon fire until they sink. With no clunky ocean AI to deal with, you’re forced into actually thinking about your approach to battle. Firstly, PVP combat is, apparently, an absolute necessity for making boat-to-boat combat fun for more than five minutes.

There’s a couple of online elements that help Maelstrom massively in this regard. With that said, Gunpowder Games don’t actually do too bad of a job with it. It’s possibly the whole reason the genre seems to sit stagnant for years. With no on-land elements, Maelstrom takes on the unenviable task of making an engaging naval battle system, something plenty of games have struggled with in the past.

It’s an interesting take on the genre, an online, PVP game with naval only battles. Gunpowder Games is the newest team to step up to the table with its free-to-play naval free-for-all, Maelstrom. Excluding the odd success though, pirate and naval games have seemingly fallen down the back of the sofa with werewolves, Dead Island 2 and the player base for Fallout 76. I would even argue one of the Assassin’s Creed series’ best games is basically just a pirate game.

#Maelstrom game best ship series

Monkey Island remains a fond memory of the 90s, the Risen series has become something of a cult classic. That’s not to say there’s never been a good one. The pirate genre has been far from inspirational in the videogame industry. Reviews // 26th Apr 2020 - 3 years ago // By Adam Kerr Maelstrom Review