Recent reviews by Zeekthephantom

FULL RELEASE REVIEW (October 31st, 2025):
The game had promise, the result is under baked. Old bugs disappeared and were replaced with new ones. Monsters sometimes just don't work now. I said I would come back if they fixed the problems I listed and I delivered, unlike them. I'd say Happy Halloween, but this game ruined mine.

EARLY ACCESS/PREVIOUS REVIEW (June 13th, 2025):
In the current state of the game, I can not recommend that people buy it.

When the game works, it is really fun. The problem is that ever since the "All Bets Down" update me and a couple friends have experienced consistent issues with bugs. This is from the level's textures just not loading in sometimes (this isn't an issue with their computers, as they usually do load correctly), to mics just suddenly stop working, and all the way to the in between rounds when choosing a new contract (or map) to play the screen remains black for multiple people (which bars them from selecting a new map or hearing people, which can then lead to further complications with loading into the actual game).

If these problems get fixed, I will update this review. Sadly for now, this game that has had great potential has sadly had it squandered.

The game used to be fun and had an interesting gameplay loop, but now it is a shell of its former self turned into every other live service game by introducing a "battlepass" type system and adding dailies rather than new content. It grabbed what it had, made it worse, and expected people who played it before to continue to want to play despite removing the large amount of freedom (removal of freely choosing subtrials and the aforementioned forced quest systems).

I know that nobody will actually read this, but that is fine, I just want to share my thoughts.

This game is very flawed, it started with a lot of hype due to it being "from the creators of L4D and L4D2" despite only like, three people working on that worked on the L4D franchise, that is its first downfall

Next, let me talk about the card system, it started as a system where you could make a deck of cards to help you in the game, pulling three cards in the order you placed them in your deck meaning that placement had a lot of meaning, and once you pulled all of your cards you were able to pull basic cards that gave you things such as extra health, stamina, ammo, and money. This changed however, as now if you play the game the drawing system of the cards is completely gone and you start with every card in your deck to begin with, which comes with the upside of you don't have to wait to have you actually be able to play a build of your game, but comes with the downside of you can't get the extra basic cards, what you have is what you have. (As a side note, another flaw is that in the tutorial it still has it as "You draw your cards in the order of which you put them" and not the new way, they couldn't bother getting the guy to re-voice a few lines or just cut it out of the tutorial )

Now the "randomization" aspect of the game: It sucks. To elaborate, the pool of "corruption" cards you get depend on your difficulty, with the harder the difficulty the more card pool you have, though the problem comes from the fact that the pool really doesn't matter unless you are playing on Nightmare (Hard difficulty) or No Hope (Impossible Difficulty), as the game has scripted events (not talking about the finale cards, which are played on finales, which is fine), from scripted bosses, to cards consistently being played on the same map (not when dying, I mean an entire different "run" as they call it). This really throws the "rougelike" elements they brag about (this is a rougelite, not a like) into the ground, though I can't contest anything above Veteran (Normal) difficulty, as I can barely get past the unfair onslaught that is this game.

I want to touch upon the difficulties for a bit, I will talk more in depth about recruit and veteran and a bit about nightmare, I will also voice complaints about no hope but this is only going off both the wiki and word of mouth. To start with the easy difficulty, Recruit, you get increased health, damage, and ammo capacity, it is in fact an easier mode, as even the corruption cards you get are drastically limited. It also disables friendly fire and is a nice starting point for if you are just coming into the game as you won't have any cards to put into your deck, though you do get less supply points than you would playing on harder difficulties. For Veteran, you still get an increase to health, damage, and ammo capacity, but it is a lot less, there are the normal amount of corruption cards and friendly fire is now enabled, you also get 75% more supply points, by now you either are confident or have built a deck that you will use with just one character as each character has their own meta build. For Nightmare you take increased "trauma", which is this game's permanent damage that can only be healed by specific means or specific cards, and you have one less down, meaning that you have one less life when being swarmed by enemies, and you start at having three downs with the third being death. Enemies have more health, damage, and appear in a greater variety, there are more corruption cards and friendly fire is more dangerous, though you get 150% more supply points instead of just 75% extra from Veteran, fewer resources also appear when using a continue. In No Hope you have the ridden dealing a lot of damage, you take a lot of trauma, your corruption pool is at its max, friendly fire is horrid, you recover nothing from the safe room, and you only get 200% extra supply points instead of the 150% from Nightmare, now this sucks to begin with but this difficulty also has zero continues, you don't get your downs back at the start of the level, the bosses roam, and once a player dies, they are dead until the start of the next map (with still one down and they are dead) or maybe not even that (I don't know) as there are no respawn points in the map, I also heard that something they don't tell you is that basically zero extra supplies (health items, quick slot item, throwables) actually spawn in the map itself, which is a problem when you are playing "It is what it is" simulator.

For the supply points since they came up, the supply points are used to buy cards for your decks, except they are random when they appear and you have to buy everything before the card in the section it appears before you can actually get the card you want, and then there are burner cards which give a negligible boost to the current map you are in, I don't even think it carries over after using a continue. Supply points are nothing to go into about, they are the average currency you have to buy the rougelite element cards to boost your next run.

That is about everything with the base game, I have a complaint with the DLC though. The characters you get can be fun, but aren't anywhere as good as the base game characters, the hives you get are unfair at times as you can easily just be launched off the map by an enemy, and the rewards aren't even worth it metagame wise, as most of the cards you get from the new currency (skulls) are burner cards, that still will never make or break a run. The maps that come with the other dlc I haven't even played yet, I don't know much about them besides characters, the leaderboard thing they have is fun, you make the game harder for points and also supply points.

Now I will talk about the good: The gun play is about what you would expect from an FPS game, it is decent. The maps are very nice except for the few times where there is a ledge that you shouldn't have fallen off of that puts you in the "HELP ME I'M FALLING" state (not to mention the insta-death I launch you off the ledge lmao instances in maps) and they also reuse maps. That is it, that is the only good I can find, the gun play is functional and the maps (while still being pretty flawed at times) are nice, that's it.

All in all, the reason I keep coming back to this game isn't because of fun, it is because I want to beat this crappy game and get my money's worth, do not buy this game, even if you are a hardcore fan of this genre.

This is a great game it really is

I may only have about 14 or 15 hours in this game as of writing this, but that doesn't mean that I haven't had genuine fun out of this
I found skull girls back before it even came out with the second encore stuff, and had fun watching gameplay of it, it was a fanservicey but fairly competent fighting game, and as I've played it the combos feel very fluid and gameplay loop in as enjoyable as any fighting game. What the big draw for me is the artstyle and the obvious love that has gone into the game, the stories of the characters are also enjoyable....

So why is this a recommendation against the game?
Well as you might have seen they recently have removed content for the game to be more inclusive, yet nobody was complaining about this, when they changed Valentine's cross stuff that was fine as that was a forced requirement by the Geneva Convention, but this isn't being forced by anything, they are just removing content from a PAID FOR GAME. That isn't everything though, they also removed and altered a lot of things in not only the game (that again, nobody complained about) they also did so to the artbook which is another PAID FOR DLC, they removed guest arts from the game and artbook as well. The fact that this is a game that originated in 2012 (turned to second encore in 2015, though the devs only really changed in 2020ish when people were unrightfully laid off without severance) has been perfectly fine up until this point in which they think the thing that was never a problem is a problem, has not been deterred from the original intent and formatting of the game, they have altered the story modes and changed entire parts of them that were in line for the 1940s reminiscent setting, they are ruining the world that was built, they are taking things away from paying people, and they are taking their community of this game for granted.

For many, this is a final straw of many other things the devs that took over and made second encore have done, and as someone who has been up to date with this game for 10+ years (though not necessarily playing) I too have reached my breaking point.

Well, this game has a nice concept but it is executed very poorly. I played this game with my friends, during this time the lunch lady at multiple intervals decided to just know where we were even when we had the flashlights off, were silent, and were standing still. At other times the lunch lady was right in front of us, looking into our souls, and then didn't even attack us. I may come back in the future but for the time being I would rather use the $5 on a Coke and a candy bar.

Sea of Thieves really do be a game about pirates