Some thoughts on Man O' War: Corsair, rough sailing and very little fun

Man O’ War: Corsair – Warhammer Naval Battles [Official Site] is, as you might guess, a game about living the life of a privateer in the Warhammer fantasy world. It has all the fixings you might expect as well: you can raid, board vessels, buy and sell goods in ports and manage a crew and ship. On paper, it’s the sort of game I’d go wild over. The reality is altogether different.

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The first campaign you start forces you into the role of a human character and puts you through the paces by means of a tutorial. It’s there you first notice some of the most persistent issues with the game. Combat of all sorts is clunky and oftentimes dull. When it’s ship-to-ship, it is often dominated by cannon fire that somehow manages to be both too accurate across multiple ranges and wholly ineffectual when it comes to dealing damage. This makes for drawn out slogs as both you and the AI ships trade fire over and over again, hitting each other nearly all the time. This isn’t to say that there aren’t locations on ships that do more damage but rather that it’s so often not a factor when it comes to winning these duels.

Indeed, it’s mostly a numbers game when it comes down to it. The vessel with the most crew, the most guns and the most allies will triumph over the rest under most circumstances. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with that if there were other ways to play the game as well. If you could apply actual naval tactics about maneuvering and positioning consistently and play the strengths of your class of vessel that would be one thing. Even galleys, whose movements depend on oarsmen instead of the wind, end up playing more or less the same as a large man o’ war. It doesn’t help that every human faction has more or less the same ship types (except the Bretonnians who get a galleon instead of a man o’ war) so before too long it feels like you’re condemned to relive the same battle over and over again.

There are sea monsters and things like dark elf corsairs that liven things up some with their unconventional design, but it’s not what you’re going to be facing for most of the game. As you start with a small ship and crew, you’re relegated to grinding resources by doing missions and bounties for the longest time and up against correspondingly weak enemies. This grind is rather trying as well, as rewards for doing missions are often pathetic. You’re better off stealing ships instead of saving up to buy something new by far. A simple upgrade to your guns or hull can mean over a dozen missions’ worth of rewards, not counting the expenses you have in paying your crew’s wages and keeping them fed.

Likewise, attempting to ingratiate yourself to a faction is also an exercise in frustration. The game allows you to perform missions for any one of the powers on the map and eventually align yourself to them. The problem is that the missions are mainly the same repetitive “sink a ship” or “deliver a spy to this port” and grant you a small amount of loyalty and money each. Even when you do get something juicier with, say, an incoming raiding party and a port you have to protect, the reward for beating the odds and making a great effort is the same as delivering a spy. I was incredibly disappointed after sinking a dozen hours into a campaign, taking up a hard mission and losing ships in my own fleet to stop a big enemy fleet, that I only got a pittance in money and that minimal amount of loyalty.

Worse yet, all the factions feel the absolute same. Other than their flag, there is nothing that sets them apart mechanically or fluff-wise. You could ally yourself to Kislev or Magritta and find that the types of missions and gameplay would remain utterly unchanged.

This disappointment isn’t limited to just the naval aspect of the game. There are also fights aplenty to be had where you control your captain and swing your sword and swash buckle. The mechanics of it are just outright horrid: not very responsive, the AI is dumb as bricks and repetitive. There’s no satisfying feedback in the fighting or skill involved.

Captain Buttery slew two dozen men all by his lonesome that night

Early on in my first game, I was attacked by a ship near port for some reason (an occurrence that happened several other times even though I was friendly with that faction) and that turned the port hostile. I tried to dock without understanding what was going on and found instead that I was raiding the settlement. As I was in my starting ship with barely a dozen crew, they all quickly got slaughtered. It was then that I noticed the less-than-stellar AI pathing and behavior. So I was able to kill 20 enemies by myself by simply walking around in a circle, waiting for my blunderbuss to reload and occasionally firing. This is a tactic that works for every encounter, even ship to ship action as the AI is incapable of cornering you and will often stand still while only two or three enemies actually chase you.

So much else of the game feels similarly unpolished. Crew management is a joke, navigating menus feels like a hassle and don’t even get me started on automatic course plotting and time compression. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times that instead of keeping to open sea, my ship would instead be driven into rocks and run aground for no reason. Forget about doing anything slightly more complex like telling the game you want to dock as it’ll assign the most circuitous route imaginable and then keep on missing the actual docks.

If you were thinking that maybe you could forgo combat of all sorts and just focus on trade, well you’d have a bad time with that as well. Though nominally there’s a supply and demand system in the game, it’s a pain to actually figure out who needs what and how much. There’s nothing that helps you keep track of prices at any given port so you’d have to take notes manually of which of the very same-y destinations was that had a good be slightly cheaper or more expensive.

Other goods like weapons and clothes are about as varied as the crew you can recruit at taverns. That is to say, not at all. Life is cheap in the world of Warhammer and thanks to the abysmal AI, you’ll be losing crew all the time even in the most lopsided engagements. Replacements are generic with only a few basic traits and no hidden potentials. You can hire specialized units like sharpshooters or faction-aligned captains but they’re more expensive and limited in use. It’s hard to care about any of your crew when there’s nothing special about them and you don’t get to use them in interesting ways.

On the visual side: the water motion and the weather looks decent most of the time but the textures to just about everything else are underwhelming. There’s a distinct lack of variety in models overall so expect to keep seeing the same crew models on both sides of a fight as well as every ship looking the same. There are about three or four types of ports/cities and the vast majority are unremarkable copies of one another. From the biggest cities (in the Warhammer lore, anyhow) to the humblest fishing village they all look about as impressive.

Many of the unique landmarks of the setting are missing as well with only Marienburg and Erengrad having the slightest bit of effort put into them on the world map. For everything else—from Imperial cities up north to Tilean city states way up south—there’s absolutely nothing special about any of them. I actually took the time to visit virtually every port in hopes that there was something to the large-ish map but it turned out that there wasn’t.

Maybe you’re holding out hope that in order to make up for all of its shortcomings, the game at least offers a compelling narrative. Well, no, it doesn’t. There’s no story at all beyond you wanting to make a name for yourself as a captain with your ship. You can retire at any point that you want and be judged on how much money you got. There’s no overarching story with factions that I could find either (though my time with them was admittedly limited given how much of a grind it is to join one and you can only really be in one at a time). The closest thing you get to a narrative is when you start another campaign as a champion of Chaos and your objective there is to raid and pillage in order to curry enough favor with the ruinous powers to ascend to daemonhood. Sweet stuff, equally pointless as it boils down to dull fight after another as you sack and pillage your way across the known world. So, more grinding without real reward.

It is a bit of a pain to kill the dangers of the deep but, hey, at least it's not yet another ship that's identical to yours

I think I could go on and on about how so many other things in the game irritated me and were frustrating but I think you get the point. All of that said, I have to admit, there were a few fleeting moments where I did find myself having fun. Encountering some of the weirder enemy types and fighting them was a cool experience as were some of the abilities of the mages you can employ. Watching factions fight one another and exploit opportunities when, for example, someone lost naval dominance in a region, was interesting. Still, that did little to offset the poor design and very repetitive gameplay elsewhere.

This is a game that I couldn’t recommend even to the most hardcore of buccaneers or Warhammer fans. It’s neither fun enough as its own game nor does it do anything interesting with or is particularly faithful to the world and its lore. I think there’s potential for it and there’s been several updates that have changed things for the better. It’s still not there, not by a long shot. Get your sailing fix elsewhere.

You can find Man o’ War on Steam or GOG.