Did they overhaul the game in any way at all?
Because while it had a nice idea, and the card-based combat could be quite tough (almost Darkest-Dungeon like in how it could shaft you), there were some really awful design decisions that ruined the whole thing.
The biggest culprit was the bizarre way upgrades worked - you needed to leave one of your guys behind on shore to help build the upgrade for some reason (!?), and they needed to be appropriately levelled first (!?), and you also needed to have certain upgrades completed before you could buy a better ship (!!?).
The second biggest issue was that the strategy part was stupidly grindy if played how they expected you to play it - your crew got a percentage of each haul (which is fine), which would increase to ridiculous levels as the levelled up (not fine - even if the captain levels up with their crew, the crew's percentages would significantly creep up so that you'd get less and less percentage of the haul as you went on, which is insane).
You could circumvent this by ensuring you grab all the whale meat as "food" every time, and then go and sell that - for some bizarre reason whale meat is lumped together with food rations, and even stranger, although its sell price is less than its buy price, it's sell price is still quite good - and even stranger again, selling food didn't count as a profit, so the crew would never get a cut from it. So you'd end up making a stupid amount of money from the crappy whale meat, compared to the pittance you'd end up with from the blubber due to your scabby crew. So this both "solves" the stupid grindiness but at the same time possibly makes things worse by making the whole economy ultra trivial.
The above issues were there since launch, and I never heard them mention they were going to fix them, so... I guess these "features" are all still there? Which is a massive shame - as others have said the little things like the sea shanties are actually pretty cool, and almost (but not quite) make it worth getting the game anyway. If they fixed these then I'd recommend the game to anyone who likes a harsh strategy experience with a vague narrative background.
