Developer: Lavaboots Studios
Publisher: Lavaboots Studios
Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG
Platform: PC
Release date: February 6, 2018
Find the game here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/327860/Salt/
Salt is an open world island exploration game that incorporates looting, crafting, killing and questing. The main goal is to build yourself a boat and travel across a fairly sized, randomly generated map, which contains a variety of desert islands with wildlife and NPCs. Developed and published by Lavaboots Studios, Salt is just the second game in their catalogue, their original being a point and click title, so this was quite the change of direction.
Let’s go from the start. The main menu is pretty bog standard, but the music… that's a different story. I think for the first time ever, I have spent more time on the main menu than I have actually playing the game itself. It's very fitting music for the game, as it sports adventurous vibes in an extremely relaxed and chilled-out manner. It’s not often that I actively seek out a game soundtrack to listen to outside of the game, but I have to say this one is extraordinarily impressive. Unfortunately, as soon as you launch into a game, the music comes to an abrupt end, and so do the positives…
The game recently left Steam Early Access and launched onto steam with a full price of £11.39 (or regional equivalent). The game itself aims to entice you with a decent variety of quests, epic / legendary loot as well as building progressively better ocean voyagers from a basic raft to a fully-fledged ship. So on paper, it sounds like your ordinary open world exploration game. But how was the execution? I have to be honest with you, this one is on the lower end of the scale.
I know graphics shouldn’t be a telling factor at all, but when some textures look seriously impressive, and some of them just look awful, it gives it an unfinished and inconstant feel. The gameplay itself is quite tedious, and the user interface feels dated in comparison to similar titles of this genre. The game starts by asking you to do the ‘usual’ for this type of game, and that is resource gathering. Tons and tons of resource gathering...What a surprise!
But wait, is there a unique item gathering system that sets this game apart from the others?! Well… Yes, but it’s awful. Collecting wood is as easy as picking up a log from the floor… I mean, what kind of system is that? Not even having to interact with a tree or perform any kind of felling? It honestly feels downright lazy. Especially when the nearest tree is 20 metres away… WHERE IS THE LOGIC?
Exploring feels awfully dull and uneventful, even when completing quests. The islands feel very similar to one another and fail to entice you to explore further. The sailing segments of the game are fairly well implemented and feel relaxing at times, although the islands are so close in proximity that most trips are fairly short. The lack of biomes makes you feel like as though you are still on the previous island, apart from the rare sighting of ruins or an irate pirate. The recent introduction of multiplayer was a nice addition, although fundamentally all you’re doing is resource gathering, sailing, looking for loot, rinse and repeat. It just simply means that you’re still bored, but this time, you are sharing that boredom with a friend…
Combat in Salt is dreadful, whilst some people may be happy with spam clicking on a terrifyingly poor rendering of a pirate until it keels over and dies a satisfactory system, it simply isn’t. Combat is supposed to be a fairly important factor in this title and it is disgraceful that little or no effort was put into this at all. I mean, I guess the combat is at least on par with Cookie Clicker.
Salt is really lacking any depth and is missing any form of end game, and feels like it was prematurely released from Steam Early Access. It feels like an awful and unpolished version of Minecraft and that’s saying something. I can only recommend this to someone who has more money than they need and more time than they can shake a stick at. So yep, that’s nobody. Sorry, but this is utter garbage.
Salt: 2.5 out of 10
- Scorpio
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