The game is great fun if you are a bunch of people, like 10+ people. The game is VERY grindy, and the world is basically controlled by the mega companies with 100+ members grinding huge bases and ships to dominate "their" islands, so finding somewhere to claim land where you have all the resources you need and build a base/ship is almost impossible, at least in my experience. If you want to build a big ship you will have to grind for hours to build it, and it can be lost very quickly if you are unlucky with glitches, meeting a mega company or getting sunk while your offline. The ship to ship combat is amazing and is much like sea of thieves where you work together to run the ship, repairing, manning the cannons, boarding other ships to stop them from repairing etc...
I have had the most fun playing unoffical servers with boosted rates, like 10x gather/taming/exp, that way you can build the big ships fast and actually take part in the mid - late game part of the game with taming, crafting, building/raiding bases and so on. There is loads of pvp with everyone being able to make ships fairly easy and its not such a big loss if you get offline raided or loose your ship / base in a fight. The maps on unofficial arent as big as official and this limits the PVE part of the game with not having all the islands, but if you want to build ships/bases and pvp instead of hitting trees for 10 hours i can strongly recommend grabbing some friends and go unoffical servers