All Guns on Deck sells itself as a real-time strategy RPG. It has been out currently two days on Steam Early Access and it shows some good fun promise. However the fact it is early access means that it has few features to actually review. But it shows serious promise with beautiful art visuals and a serious mayhem style of gameplay.
So All Guns on Deck places you in charge of a vessel of the glorious empire of Eutopia. The introduction cutscene shows your previous ship’s destruction at the hands of so unknown behemoth. You are therefore patched back together and put in charge of a brand new ship to wreak havoc upon Eutopia’s enemies and presumably defeat that creature when it’s updated into the game.
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The main hub of your game is the ship. Ships can be various different sizes, and can vary upon the number of guns, crew members and armour. You can man most areas of the ship to act automatically, which helps as the battles are absolute mayhem. You have three ships available at the start of the game, and I usually went for the biggest I had with the best guns.
The crux of the game is the nightmare battles. Your ship takes centre stage and will be attacked by a set number of enemies within a round. Your ship will take damage, it is inevitable, so you must use your crew to repair the ship faster than the damage being caused and take the enemies out as quick as possible. The more waves you take out in a single grouping, the more doubloons you earn and the more upgrades you can purchase for your ship. The invariable cycle of grinding will ensue for a little, although many of the upgrades are cheap and doubloons are dealt out quite happily.
This is all of the game there is currently. There are some obvious holes due to this early access process. The customisation menu is lacking in options and some features outright do not work. Nonetheless, you cannot disguise the lack of an options menu as a problem of early access. Not everybody has a behemoth PC and not being able to tone down any options will put people off even an early access game. However, what the game is lacking is pretty much all customisation options so the main meat of the game is still there to play. The game hub
Yet this is a fun little hell hole of a strategy game with no crippling bugs or flaws currently. This is shaping up to be a good game, and I definitely mean that. It’s a shame I cannot rate this more highly. Partly because as I write this the game is two days old, partly because it is early access.
Early access cycles are usually three years, and I predict by about the first year this game will be even more of a blast than it is now. I reckon a year down the line this game would get a 4.5 simply because not everyone will love the ‘push you over the cliff into the fire pit’ mentality of the battle system. However, because the early access is missing a few of the features that deem it a basic game like an options menu and the fact that incomplete parts of the customisation are flaunted rather than hidden until done; this early access gets a 3.5. Some people will enjoy it at this early stage and some won’t. A year down the line I will pick this game up again and I know it will be awesome.
Title: All Guns On Deck
Players: Single Player
Platform: PC
Publisher: Kiss Ltd
Developer: Decaying Logic
Early Access Release Date: Friday 28 August 2015
SRP: $12.99 / £9.99 / 11,99€
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