King of Seas

Fun, cartoonish pirating, which makes you feel cheeky rather than evil.

The RPG elements mean you'll nearly always be making some forward momentum. Finding treasure, sinking ships, and completing missions rewards you with XP, and you can upgrade and customise various parts of your boat to ensure your vessel is ship-shape. What's more, each town has its own side missions to tackle, and a market where you can trade goods in a shifting economy. These parts of the game are its strengths, but working through somewhat confusing menus and engaging in predictable battles take the wind out of its sails.

King of Seas gets off to a pretty decent start with a promising story and combat mechanics that are initially fun to engage with. However, the repetition isn't long creeping in. This is a game that's seriously lacking in any sort of depth, jettisoning much of its early promise in favour of a bog-standard narrative, hugely repetitive side quests, overly punitive combat that thinks nothing of wasting your time and a constant, mind-numbing grind that very quickly becomes a tedious waste of effort. If you're absolutely desperate for a high seas adventure, there's still a measure fun to be had with the combat in brief stints here but, beyond that, this one really is more of a Sir Francis Drag than a Sir Francis Drake.

King of Seas does lots of things well, from its visual presentation to the simplicity of its sailing mechanics. It touches base with many of the things that made classics out of the games that came prior while streamlining the experience into something that feels like a store-brand version of the thing I actually wanted. The lack of real keyboard and mouse support is a black eye on the PC version, though the foundation here is stable enough that King of Seas can have a brighter future through updates.

King of Seas is an engaging enough game, offering good ship-to-ship combat and a generally fun time to play through when it doesn't weigh you down with excessive amounts of grind. If you stick through the grind, this is the sort of game that is more than good enough to drop in and out of, giving you a good outlet to meet your pirate-related urges.

In short, King of Seas is a very promising effort, but it is betrayed by the choices of its creators, mainly in the field of history, but also its mechanisms.

King of Seas more than earns its keep given its price-point (it comes in at a very respectable $25 USD on the Xbox/Microsoft store) as it is an enjoyable, casual gaming experience with combat that is easy to grasp, isn’t tedious, and has numerous diversions, from trading to resource gathering and exploration. Even with the minimal issues that I personally had with some of the design choices, King of Seas is still a wonderful and worthy title in the ever-growing pantheon of indie games that are sweeping the market in lieu of standout AAA-titles.

King of Seas has all the ingredients to bake into a fresh riveting pirate game. It just feels like the cook tripped on deck, and seagulls flew off with some of them while leaving the others half-eaten.

Overall, King of Seas possesses great potential, but its flaws take the wind out of its sails. The core gameplay around a procedurally generated pirate world is exciting, especially given the special abilities and ship customization. However, the game becomes too much of a grind early on even on the easiest difficulty mode and has several frustrations related to the camera perspective, difficult controls, and steep learning curve. For veteran and patient players, the game possesses near-unlimited challenges which pose a significant test of one’s abilities. Casual players, on the other hand, might want to set sail for calmer waters. Then again, no one said that becoming king was easy.

Overall, King of Seas is a serviceable action-RPG with a pirates theme that is intended for a more casual audience. Its mechanics are solid, and the title is entertaining enough for short bursts of gameplay, but its grindy and repetitive nature quickly takes the wind out of its sails. Some of my complaints are certainly fixable in future updates, at which point I imagine the game to be a solid option for those who yearn for a decent but simplistic pirate life simulator. For now, I'd steer clear until some changes are implemented, or you can wait for a substantial sale.