Lost Sea

This game was reviewed using a code sent by the developer/publisher but this did not effect my opinion on the game.
Lost Sea is an arcade survival roguelike game, developed and published by Eastasiasoft, releasing on July 5th 2016 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Due to a plane crash in the Bermuda Triangle, your character finds themselves stranded on a tropical island so obviously your aim is to find a way off it. In order to do that, you must explore the island in search of food, other stranded people and build yourself a ship capable of getting out of there!
The gameplay in Lost Sea is played from top down view and has very basic hack and slash combat elements. Your character’s main attack is simply a swing of the sword, but you will come across other pieces of equipment too such as a shotgun of sorts. You will be fighting against pretty much what you would expect on a tropical island, wild animals, huge giants, dinosaurs, crazy island dwellers, and more. Due to the game’s very basic combat system, you find yourself having to dodge more and carefully time your attacks on foes as you will soon find out, death in permanent here. If you die, you start right at the beginning again; it oh so annoying but also part and parcel of roguelike games. I think the perma death feature wouldn’t be so bad if they allowed you to keep all of your well earned abilities and skills that you have gathered up to that point but alas we can't have it all.
On the subject of these skills and abilities, any enemies you kill will drop coins and experience points; back at your home base you can trade these in for new skills and abilities which will aid you on your exploration of the island. These can range from straight up health increases, or allowing you to have more people in your party of explorers. I personally really liked the skill and ability system in Lost Sea, but it let me down a tad when I found out they don’t carry over between runs - it almost makes them feel a little pointless at times.
Other part’s of Lost Sea’s gameplay really irk me a tad too; as you progress through the game, you will soon be heavily reliant on the rest of your team mates; these bring along their own unique traits to your party such as being able to dig up hidden treasure, or unlock locked away items in chests - so they become pretty key to your progression. Sadly they have a very poor AI programmed into them. When you get attacked by enemies they will just freeze where they stand and do nothing; common sense would make them run away and hide, but they just knuckle down and do nothing until the danger has passed, this came across as a very poor design to me. Another issue with the AI is that they are so prone to getting stuck behind objects and pieces of the world that you will spend a good portion of time backtracking in order to free them from that hidden wall they are constantly running into.
Lost Sea’s bright and colourful art style gives the game a playful look to it; one that I particularly enjoyed, the character models look well detailed and well animated with the enemies looking impressive too. The game’s environments are definitely well worth exploring if only for the graphical fidelity on them. I would have liked to see some voice acting throughout as the sound effects are a little on the low quality side but nothing overly bad at the end of the day.
This game is difficult, no question about it. It is almost as forgiving as Dark Souls when it comes down to instant deaths, as monsters will literally jump out of trees, charge at you and you’ll die. This happens more times than I can count on one hand and does leave you feeling a little deflated in terms of wanting to pick up the controller again and jumping straight into another run, because quite simply, you are starting the game all over again. Yes you do unlock a portal like system in order to teleport to where you died, but your character is so under leveled and poorly equipped that you would just end up dying even quicker than before.
This game has tons of content, and I found it hard to actually find someone who had managed to complete the game even now 10 days after it’s release. I am not sure it would have much replayability as the actual story and plot does not change from run to run, and to be honest I would be more than happy to get one complete run out of this title, because it is so tough in the first place.
Apart from the issues mentioned with the buggy AI of the other team members, Lost Sea is a pretty technically sound release. The game is definitely going to require you to pick up your controller over keyboard and mouse though. I feel Lost Sea would have really benefited from a multiplayer mode too; after all everything is better with friends, and this would of been no different. A co-op mode for this game would be absolutely awesome and one that I hope they can add in the future.
Overall Lost Sea is an OK release. There is nothing absolutely mind boggling good coming out of it, but it doesn’t do too much wrong either. The permadeath element definately needs changing to make the gameplay a little more forgiving and to cut down on the amount of rage quits this game induces on its players though. The game’s full price of £10.99 is well marked for a game of this quality and amount of content on offer.
Tom's Score Card
1) Stay away
2) Not Recommended
3) Only recommended when on sale
4) Recommended
5) Highly recommended
6) This is a must play
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Lost Sea is a rogue-lite adventure game in which you explore procedurally generated islands, fight monsters, purchase upgrades for both yourself and your ship with the treasure you find, and recruit allies with a range of skills to assist you on your journey.
.Story.
You’ve been marooned on an island by a convenient turn of events. You meet a scientist who explains to you that, by finding magical tablets, you can travel from island to island and hopefully escape.
So… You do just that.
.Gameplay.
The game can be played with either keyboard and mouse or gamepad. I used the latter simply because it was far more comfortable than the keyboard setup.
You begin each playthrough by selecting 1 of 8 characters. These are merely aesthetic and have no bearing on how the game will play.
Then, you hop onto your ship and sail to the first island in the first zone (unless you have warp, but more on that later). Islands have a varying enemy difficulty from easy-hard. On them, you’ll hunt down tablets, which can be found at random, so that you can move from island to island. One tablet means you can move to the next islands in the chain of islands.
You’ll continue doing this until you reach the large island at the end—the one with a huge skull and dark, ominous clouds hanging above it—where you’ll face a boss.
If you die, you’re given a statistical breakdown of what you’ve done in game:
Regions Discovered
XP
Gold
Deaths
Crew Recruited
Enemies Killed
Items Used
Time Played
Then, you choose a character and dive into the game with a fraction of the resources you picked up during your last run and none of the skills you’ve unlocked.
Rinse, wash, and repeat.
Once you clear a zone you unlock the ability to Warp between them freely. There are four in total, not counting the starting area.
The islands also contain collectable treasures and pickups with a variety of effects. These pickups can heal you, add more stats, and the like. Unfortunately, there’s no telling what items do until you use them. Once or twice I’ve tried a mysterious potion that miraculously drained all of my HP or some other awful thing that put me at a horrible disadvantage when fighting the foes on the island.
.Atmosphere.
The islands are rather uniform in appearance, despite their procedural generation. Every area has its own biome, which is visually interesting at the very beginning of the chain of islands, but quickly loses its luster.
The music is nothing special, just a repeating loop that gets lost in the background.
.Longevity.
There are plenty of upgrades to unlock and treasures to discover while you travel the isles. Dying results in you losing all of those upgrades, but the amount of resources retained after you die is pretty generous, so you should have no problem regaining the skills you lost.
There isn’t a story so you could go on playing indefinitely as long as you’re willing.
.Pros and Cons.
Boss fights are fun in the classic learn-the-attack-pattern-in-order-to-win style.
A good mix of upgrades available for combat and exploration.
Crew members have different skills, which allow for some strategizing.
Character selection has no bearing on gameplay.
Procedural generation doesn’t create any particularly different levels.
Your crew members aren’t very intelligent. They will cower and take damage from both enemies and yourself (yes, friendly fire is a thing) and will oftentimes die. They won’t fight back and they won’t try to get away.
It takes quite a bit of grinding to be able to afford new skills. Until then, combat is monotonous.
There’s no description of items. It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what does what.
.Bottom Line.
Lost Sea is a fun, albeit repetitive experience. Newcomers to the rogue-like genre will find a good starting place here, though veterans will likely get bored with the basic combat and the lacking arsenal of pickups/equipment.
All in all, a title I’d suggest getting at a discount or avoiding entirely.

Introduction.
Lost Sea is an Indie Action , Rogue-like title that features Permadeath Gameplay and Procedular Generation.
Your hero has been stranded onto a tropical island due to a plane crash. With the help of other stranded crew members that you find on your path and upgrades you can purchase at each island's dock , your quest is to navigate through the islands up until you reach the final one which allows you to enter a portal that leads you to an unknown place, presumably somewhere safe.
Gameplay.
When you first start your journey or everytime you have to restart due to death , you can select from 8 Equally Powered Characters. There are five male and three female Heroes to choose from.
The tutorial island does a decent job at covering all the basic knowledge you will need throughout your journey. You will meet a Self-proclaimed scientist , that will explain to you your situation and how to deal with it. As soon as you are done with the tutorial island the game sends you straight to the next one.
There are 5 Sections in total. Each section has its own biome theme , monsters and a boss fight on the last island. Beating that boss permanently unlocks you the next section. (Meaning if you die after reaching a new section, you can start at it's beginning as opposed to the very first Tropical Island you start the game at, if you choose to.)
The idea of the game is to search these procedually generated islands for new crew members, items that will aid you, Monsters for their EXP-Currency drops (Which are needed for Player based upgrades), Crates and Barrels for their Coin drops (Which are needed for Ship Related Upgrades) and mainly for Navigation Tablets which are the only way for you to move forward to the next island. Once you require those tablets , you ought to bring them back to the island's dock and then if you decide you are finished with that island you can move to the next ones.
Something that will be noticeable throughout the game and something I didnt see many reviewers mention correctly (In my opinion) is the Difficulty Curve. While the game has some Pseudo-Difficulty elements which upset me at first , but then I realised there weren't that many (Talking about charging Lizards coming out of nearby harmless-looking coin boxes and Crew Members you're about to rescue suddently turning into monsters that attack you as soon as you get close). It actually came to me by surprise how the game doesn't want to take you by the hand showing you every little way to deal with things easier and that it expects you to learn it by experience by yourself. No Pickup/Item you find in the game ever has description. You have to judge what the Item does based on it's icon and use it atleast once to be sure of what it does. Attack patterns of monsters you've encountered for the first time are not visible from afar. Sometimes you have to get close and personal to learn what they do and although that experience goes away as soon as you learn the pattern , I think its really cool.
Game Design and Controlls.
The monster design while being basic has a nice variety, making the difficulty curve extremely noticeable for players. Each section you move forward you will find new monsters and revamped versions of old ones with more challenging attack patterns.
While it can be said that the monster design is pleasing, the same thing cannot be said for the Boss Battle(s). Each boss battle features the same boss. An angry pirate captain that each time you meet on a later section has a new trick under his sleeve. While it's not a rule that all games should have a variety of bosses and can't have an upgraded version of the same one , this particular gameplay feature could've been executed much better.
Visually the game looks gorgeous for it's theme. Everything seems in-place, the colours blend in beautifully , each biome is its own place and thats how it should feel. Something I found really interesting was that the game actually has a day-night cycle that has zero impact in the game whatsoever ,but its a feature meant only for visual purposes and I think its great.
The object breaking/coin collecting animations and sounds are satisfying. The attack and skill animations could be better but its overally fine. When it comes to sounds mainly, I would say that everything is well made. Soundtracks may be decent at most but do a great job at blending in with the visual theme. The only thing I absolutely despised was the Grunts the Boss made, it felt really out of place. Other than that the characters themselves could use some more grunt sounds. (I use the word Grunt here because there is no voice over dialogue this game.)
I can say that the Monster AI is fairly well made too , nothing is really that exploitable but the Crew Member AI can sometimes be really frustrating. Much more noteably later on in the game when through upgrades you will be controlling up to 4 Crew members in total. You will find yourself moving around the island with them getting stuck prety often.
Another feature that was lacking that bothered me alot was the fact that you cannot recruit new crew members without manually opening up a slot. The game should offer the ability to either switch-out immediately with another selected crew member or the ability to just send the new-found crew members at the dock without using them at all. It would also be great if we had a bonus for rescuing more/all/any crew members.
Last but not least. A very important matter/issue with the game is the Controls. I've played the game with a Controller and it played absolutely lovely. Although. Keyboard users have issues when it comes to camera control. The game's keyboard default keys allow you to rotate your camera with K and L, each representing a direction and M to refocus the camera back to the center. As far as I've noticed the keybindings cannot be changed in the ingame settings and can be only changed through editing gamefiles , ontop of that there is no speed adjustment for how fast/slow the camera rotates and trust me when I say its significantly slower than the controller rotation speed.
The Pros.
A Good variety of upgrades , powerups and gameplay elements.
Visual Theme and soundtracks blend well and are really pleasant.
Game rewards you for managing your resources smartly.
Full Controller Support.
46 Achievements For You To Hunt For.
Steam Trading Cards.

The Cons.
Gameplay can be repetitive.
Being Unable To sprint while holding a Navigation Tablet makes the gameplay sometimes feel slow.
A lot of Backtracking.
Crew AI can be frustrating at times.
Keyboard Controls feel wacky
Boss fights while having challenging aspects its essentially a revamped version of the old boss.

Conclussion.
If you are a fan of rogue-likes and you would like to see a different base idea of gameplay the Lost Sea will most likely be a game for you. The game has its own flaws but in my opinion is an overall well made game that could use some improvements here and there. Keep in mind that the game currently plays best on Controllers. Hopefully my review will help you out on deciding whether you want to buy the game or not.

Lost Sea is a cool little exploration, action game featuring rogue-like mechanics such as permadeath and procedural generation.
Journeying from one island to the next you explore through mutliple regions, encounter differnt enemies and collect items, tablets, crew members, gold and experience to help you progress to further reaches of the game. Rogue-like lovers or players who enjoy exploration and strategy will find a lot to like in this title but it is far from a perfect experience.
Positives ->
+ The music and art are appropriately jaunty and pleasing.
+ Procedrual generation, differing regions and areas within regions, a day/night cycle and dynamic weather keep the game feeling fresh and interesting as you explore.
+ The game adds a layer of strategy and management not often found in rogue-like games. Crew management, tablet rescuing and rpg style upgrades all give you strategic options for you to mess around with.
+ The game feels fun to explore. You're rewarded for looking in every nook and cranny of the islands by discovering a myriad of game resources that help you through your journey.
Negatives ->
- The combat can be one-dimensional and begin to become dull. Player upgrades eventually help to make the combat more dynamic and interesting but don't do enough to completely fix the problem.
- The game suffers from having no minimap. Having to constantly open the map to check your position relative to where you want to explore merely serves to slow down the gaming experience.
- Boss battles are fairly repetitive. They are structured, not random and from one battle to the next the mechanics of the fight change only slightly. It seems like much more interesting and grandiose things could have been done for boss battles.
- The game's AI is unfortunately idiotic. Getting stuck behind walls is a constant struggle and leaves you needing to run back and collect the crew that got lost behind you. They can also serve as a massive headache during skirmishes with enemies and it can be difficult to keep them alive in later sections of the game.
For those looking for my expanded thoughts ->

A good little roguelike hack and slash. The graphics are cool and colorist, but even though there isn't much diversity of elements to see, demand excesive hardware or the screen can freezes causing the deletion of the save file if program is closed by force. Also have another issue, the Keyboard only can be binded by editing a file (check Steam forums).
Very simple mechanics: by getting experience and gold coins, player can unblocks skills, space for inventory and crew that works as powerups. Combat is easy but it getting hard by stages, is based on the fact that player haven´t a ranged weapon to use at will and many foes has ranged attacks.
Gameplay strongly depends on speed that player can get by upgrading skills. It has randomized maps based on modular design, but there are few varieties and are quite similar. The luck maths and dificulty curvature are very well balanced, a very rare qualities in this genre. The foes are well depicted, but some haven't much relation with the plot.
The campagin has 6 stages wich at least 5 maps each, every map has from 8 to 12 random modules for explore; complete all stages with 85% of achievements takes about 36 hours of playing, majority to understood wich are the better skills and items, map system, how to beat foes and so. Wonderful for children and teenagers, or as casual game for adults. To buy with a high discount or in bundles.

Gameplay here:
Cool little game I picked up during Steam 2016 Holiday Sale. I didn't die once but from the description it seems like it has rogue-like permadeath mechanics.
Fair warning: It does not support mouse at all and recommends that players use controllers 100% of the time. Keyboard controls weren't to my liking.
Gameplay seems cool to me but this game isn't my cup of tea. If you are in to this kind of game, I think it is worth the price during a sale. I'm still going to recommend it since it would be unfair to downvote a game based on my misunderstanding. Cheers.

Game play here:
I will preface this review by saying I did pick this game up on sale (for around £1) and not at the full RRP.
I don't normally enjoy games with perma death, however, so far it's been fun to play for a short while and is worth the price I personally payed. I don't know how many more hours I will get out of it, but think it'll be fun to load up now and again!
The item slots are frustrating as you're only allowed one item at a time (unless you pay a lot to upgrade), all the upgrades feel expensive, and the maps are so samey. Each island it feels like you're doing the same thing and nothing really changes.
Nonetheless, I recommend picking it up on sale as a good little time waster.