Welcome Time Wasters!
This week my time wasting was on a console again! I know its shocking, but I do sometimes consistently review console games instead of just PC and mobile games for the Time Waster. Continuing on, this week’s game to kill some time with is Lost Sea.
Lost Sea is all about exploring islands after our main character’s plane crashes in the Bermuda Triangle. He teams up with another man with a ship and the two set sail to try and find a way to escape the series of islands that they are now stranded on.
The combat in Lost Sea consists of swinging your sword. That’s really about all there is to it. Well, that’s not completely fair. Players can use experience that they gain from monsters to buy additional abilities. These include both active and passive abilities. Some example of active abilities include a 360-sword swing, dodge roll and a charge attack. While the variety is nice, players will never really need these abilities, which makes them feel kind of useless.
The passive abilities that are available in Lost Sea are much more useful. They include carrying more items, increasing movement speed, more health and stamina, as well as letting the player bring more crew members with them.
Oh yeah. Crew members are a critical part of Lost Sea. During their journey, the player can find random people that are also stuck on the islands. These people can be brought into the player’s crew and have special abilities. Just like with the player, crew have both active and passive abilities. The active ones let the player uncover more loot from islands. This is possible with crew that can fix bridges, mine and unlock chests. Passive abilities have crew providing the player with more XP, higher damage and a few other effects. Unlike with the player’s abilities, both types of abilities are good for crew.
Players can’t actually control what abilities their crew members come with, but they can always choose to leave useless crew behind. The player can only have a max of four crew members after upgrades and there’s no option to bring the extras along to the next island. That means players have to weigh out what abilities are important to them, but that shouldn’t really be too hard to do.
Players can also collect gold coins while traversing the islands in Lost Sea. This doesn’t allow them to purchase items, but it does let them upgrade their ship. All of this is handled by speaking with that first guy the player met with back at the start of the game. Why in the world he’s charging his fellow survivors looking to get off these islands I don’t know. That’ be like the Professor from Gilligan’s Island refusing to help the other castaways if they didn’t pay him for his services. It just doesn’t make much sense.
Either way, their are quite a few upgrades that players can unlock for their ship. They range from healing crew between islands, locating tablets and crew at the next island, crew not taking damage while cowering (your crew refuses to help you fight) and some other benefits. Honestly, the ship upgrades aren’t quite as important as the character ones, but there isn’t anything else to spend money on.
We’ve talked about what to do on these islands, but not much about them or our travels. The setup of Lost Sea is that players have to seek out tablets that give them access to new islands. These are found on the islands and there are typically three on each. Players don’t have to collect every tablet on each island, but they get more options if they do.
The row of islands that players can travel to act like the board from a board game. Think of the tablets as the dice. Each tablet represents a roll. That roll is how many islands forward the player can move. At the end of each “board” waits a boss. I could talk about this more, but the bosses are forgettable and easy to defeat.
Lost Sea brings with it procedurally-generated islands for the player to explore. The player starts off on tropical islands, but the game does change things up by adding in skins for desert, volcano and other island types. However, it still does start to feel samey after a while.
The visuals of Lost Sea aren’t bad, but they aren’t really good either. It goes for a more cartoon-style of appearance that includes deformed characters. There’s an obvious attempt at charm here that even works to a degree, but maybe not as much as the developer was hoping for. It also doesn’t help that the enemies and islands all look the same after so many trips, which just makes the game appear more bland than it may really be.
As far as audio goes, well it’s completely forgettable. I know there was music for the islands and that this music changed depending on the island type. Despite this, I can’t for the life of me remember it. It really did its job as background music by being so in the background it wasn’t even noticeable. The sound effects are solid, but don’t stand out in the least.
Overall, Lost Sea isn’t a bad game, but its not really all that good either. It’s probably one of the best examples of how a score can sum up the quality of a game better than words can. So without further ado.
Lost Sea earns 3 GiN Gems out of 5!
Developers: Eastasiasoft Limited
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One