Nantucket - Masters of the Seven Seas

Like the base game, this expansion showed promise but ended up being a bit undercooked.
For every plus there is a minus that cancels it out.

Now you have the entire globe at your disposal, but it is empty. Other captains roam the seas, but they develop so slowly that they cannot compete with you (by the time I bought the best ship and upgraded the crew, only two of them moved from a starting sloop to a brig).

A party can last up to fifty years, but after ten years there is nothing to do in the game: the ship and crew are pumped to the maximum, money is not needed, all quests are completed. But you can’t finish the game, because there is no main quest to kill Moby in this mode.

Therefore, if you want the corresponding achievement, then you will have to just hang out at sea and waste time for 40 in-game years. It's a pity that the developers did not provide for a tenfold acceleration of time.

This review is a placeholder until i finish the game.

This transforms the game into the open-world experience it should have been in the first place.

Having a cylindrical map makes a huge difference, because it allows you to sail around the world in a meaningful way.

Once you've played the game in challenge mode, you won't be able to go back to story mode.

With the ability to circumnavigate the globe now and over 100 new missions, this is easily worth the six bucks they are asking.

The Short Version: Not Recommended

I have completed the base game in Iron Man mode and put in about 8 hours or so into this DLC.

Challenge Mode was interesting, but there is not enough interaction with the other captains to make it feel any different than a sandbox mode of the base game. In fact after I made it to #1 captain on the scoreboard and was on cruise control (the other ships are no competition) I started craving the main quests from the base game. I don't know why they didn't introduce more quest chains for unique items, more creatures to fight, a new story campaign (perhaps dealing with the mythological - kraken anyone?), or any of the other things that could have breathed more life into this game. Even just the option of clubbing baby seals for furs up in the arctic. I mean who wouldn't enjoy that?

The new city events were very welcome (healthy trait for visiting the *ahem* House of Ill Repute), but there didn't seem to be enough of them to provide more than a quick speed-bump of novelty before getting back to the grind of whacking whales and upgrading your ship.

The new map feels like something that should have been included in the base game, and the new locations in India and Japan don't really have much to offer.

This game feels like it was bound for South Australia but never quite arrived as the Australian Border Patrol incarcerated it in an offshore detention centre while its refugee visa application was processed.

Rating - 5/10 and not worth the price. I really hope they develop something more for their next DLC. The map is now developed and the game mechanics could support a completely new story. It was really the quests that pull this game along and without a new deep quest line there just isn't enough here for veterans.