King of Seas is an action-adventure game set on the open sea. Using a procedurally generated map, the game offers tons of content to please your inner pirate. Do you have what it takes to tame the wild waters and become the best pirate out there?
A pirate’s life for me
You start the game with either Princess Marylou or Prince Luky, heirs to the King’s Fortress kingdom. They have a lot going for them and their future certainly looks bright. As a true coming-of-age story, our protagonist has to take off with the royal ship for the first time, showing he/she is a worthy successor to the throne. What should have been a celebration ended up as a nightmare. In their absence, their father has mysteriously been murdered by unknown forces. The Royal Navy blames you and blows up your ship, leaving you to die in the open seas. Of course, you won’t die just yet as you’re being rescued by the last pirates on earth. Banned from your own kingdom, you’re forced to live the life of an outlaw, a thrilling life filled with adventure and tons of loot.
Discover the world
Being a pirate, it’s your main job to get your hands on some resources and start trading. Throughout the adventure, you’ll find plenty of welcoming outposts willing to trade with pirates. As long as you don’t act suspiciously, most settlements won’t attack you. Trading is important to upgrade your weapons and ship in order to travel further and battle bigger ships. I like how the exploration elements go hand in hand with a deeper RPG layer. If you don’t like to spend a lot of your time in menus, this probably won’t be a game for you, although there’s still more than enough action to be found. What I personally liked most about this game is sailing over the open sea, trying to find my next location while constantly being distracted by potential loot along the way. It reminded me of my glory days with The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, although the quality of this game isn’t really on par of course.
The exploration is well done and Sea of Thieves offers more than enough content to keep you engaged. This isn’t one of those Indie Games that deliver a rather empty open world. In this one, there’s a lot to be found although you’ll need to push past the first couple of hours. Since there are a lot of elements you’ll need to learn, the game does things rather slowly at first, explaining the basics step by step. I like the existence of a tutorial in such a mechanic-heavy game but it really takes away all the pacing. If you’re going to play this game, that’s something you certainly need to take into consideration.
A bit rough around the edges
Sea of Thieves is a rather enjoyable game, especially on my Xbox Series X where I barely noticed any graphical issues. There are some things worth pointing out, however, the biggest issue being the controls. I tested this on both my Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch and had trouble getting used to the controls in both versions. The ship doesn’t really control that well and it happened a lot more than I would like to admit that I just crashed my ship on a couple of rocks. Turning around is hard and takes some time, which can become rather frustrating in battles. I see what the developers were trying to achieve here, moving a ship around in real life isn’t easy and takes some time, so you see that reflected in the way you handle the ship. It’s probably close to reality but for an action-packed game like this one, some smoother controls wouldn’t have hurt. I kept up losing my ship in combat multiple times because I wasn’t quick enough in maneuvring my ship through narrow spots.
Although you’ll eventually get used to these controls and you’ll get better and better at it, there are some other things that take you out of the immersion. The biggest question I have after playing this for a couple of hours is why there isn’t a mini-map on the screen? It’s a game focussing on exploration and yet you only can access the map from the menu, which is extremely frustrating during the longer sailing sessions. Opening the menu and hoping my ship was still on the right track, really took me out of the experience a couple of times. It’s not like pirates had to go to a completely sealed-off room to check their map and reroute their journey if they noticed they might have missed a crucial turn. It’s a shame really but it’s something that I hope will get fixed in the future.
The Nintendo Switch version
As I pointed out, I tested this game on Xbox and Nintendo Switch, and although both versions are identical, the Switch version does come with some extra technical issues, especially in handheld mode. If you want to play this in handheld mode only, you won’t have the best experience with it. It happened more than once that the game dropped in fps while sailing, making it even harder to completely immerse yourself in the pirate world. On top of that, it’s also one of those games that will constantly activate the fans of the Switch to cool down the system while playing, a bit bizarre as it doesn’t look like a CPU-heavy game. That being said, you do have access to perhaps one of the most complete and fun pirate games on the system so it’s still definitely worth looking into.
Conclusion:
King of Seas is a fun pirate RPG filled with content to keep you going for hours. It’s a great game to spend some time with and I’m pretty sure fans of the genre will enjoy it. Just don’t expect the same quality as in some of the bigger pirate games since this one struggles with a couple of issues. That being said, it’s certainly worth playing if you’re looking for a streamlined pirate RPG.
