King of Seas

King of Seas was reviewed on a PS4

Let me start this review by saying that King of Seas is a lot of fun. The long texts of dialogues and the drab visuals were off putting at first, but as I spent more time with the game, I fell in love with it.  The last time I had this much fun engaging in naval combat was in AC 4: Black Flag. It’s a rather plain game. It doesn’t offer much variety and the visuals are average, but the gameplay loop is so entertaining that it makes it easy to ignore most of its flaws.

What is King of Seas?

King of Seas is a top down pirate RPG featuring a procedurally generated world filled with treasures to find and ships to sink. The core gameplay loop consists of fighting other ships and settlements, trading, and looting as you level up your character and unlock more abilities.

You play as the child of king Alexander, who died after a voodoo spell, was cast on him. For some reason, you, his own child, are accused of his murder. This accusation forces you to fly the black flag and become a swashbuckling pirate. Working towards proving your innocence, all while sinking hundreds of ships and probably killing thousands.

If you haven’t guessed it already, the story in King of Seas is nothing more than a placeholder. Its sole purpose is to justify the countless missions the game wants you to do. The missions themselves don’t really amount to anything other than simple tasks. These tasks are very derivative in nature, deliver an item to someone or sink a certain ship. However, that’s understandable given the simplistic nature of the game.

Ayy Ayy, Captain !

Dodging and flanking multiple enemy ships at once, using the various abilities available is truly astounding. You can literally summon a monster’s tentacle from underwater while breathing fire from the front of your ship. In combat, your options are endless. King of Seas’ ships are highly customizable. All of them are equipped with two sets of cannons on each side, and you can assign four different abilities to them.

Lining the perfect shot by steering side by side next to your enemy’s ship is extremely satisfying. Watching that final blow land and the wooden debris flying off the hull of the ship is a treat. As you progress further in the game, you’ll be able to pull off those cannon shots like a pro. Navigating the ship in combat takes a while to get used to, since its movement is a bit slow so it can be a bit difficult to steer. Some ships are considerably faster than others are. However, even with a fast ship, you’ll still spend a lot of time traveling across the map.

Your ship has three different health bars, the sails’ health, the hull’s health, and the number of crewmembers. Once your hull’s health reaches zero, your ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Having your sails destroyed immobilizes your ship, and losing all of your crew means there’s no one to fire the cannons anymore.

The same goes for any enemy ships you encounter. At the recommended difficulty, there’s no penalty for dying but it does respawn you back to the bottom of the map so you’ll have to cross the ocean again just to get where you want to go. It’s easy to die in King of Seas, so not having to worry about losing all of your cargo is a relief.

Makes You Feel Like A Pirate

You gain experience points by looting shipwrecks, gathering items and rescuing stranded sailors. Each time you level up, you gain a skill point that you can use to upgrade your abilities. There’s a whole skill tree to unlock but most of the abilities are passive skills such as an increase in navigation speed, or the effectiveness of your special attacks.

This is not an issue really, since you can buy special attacks at almost every port. These special attacks are versatile and varied. To name a few, you can install a flamethrower, you can summon a tentacle monster, you can summon a clone of your ship as a decoy, and you can even use a swarm of seagulls as a means of reducing the damage your ship receives.

At the ports, which are nothing more than a list of menus to choose from, you can recruit young sailors to do your bidding, or visit the carpenter to fix your ship or buy a new one. You can also take on a wide variety of side quests such as escort missions and delivery missions.

Not a great looker

The world of King of Seas is very bland. It’s primarily made up of small blob-like islands and the ports that are littered across the map. There’s rarely any interesting landmarks to visit, so it is easy to get tired from the uninspiring visuals. The whole game looks like a glorified mobile game to be honest, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying pretending to be a pirate. I just wished there was a bit more variety to the game’s locations.

If you’d rather not go on a power trip and destroy every vessel in your path, you can play King of Seas as a merchant. At each port, the prices of the market items vary based on the amount that the city produces of each item.  Meaning you can buy wood at a low price in one port, and then sell it at another where it’s much more expensive. This mechanic isn’t very entertaining since you’re unable to know the prices of each port until you visit them, meaning you’ll be carrying around those rubies for a while before finding the right port. The map doesn’t mark where each port is located is a major issue in the game, and that gets particularly problematic during the later hours of the game.

Outside of its unremarkable missions, it lets you enjoy its sandbox world whichever way you like. There is a lot of grinding in this game, and that can ruin its pacing at times. Since the map is too big, you’ll also spend a lot of time trying to reach your destination. You’ll spend most of your time farming for XP points during your playthrough just so you could progress the story, but that’s where most of your enjoyment will come from.

Overall,

King of Seas is a game that’s easy to pick up and play. It makes it easy to enjoy its sandbox without worrying much about anything else other than being a pirate. Fighting other ships using the weapons and abilities at your disposal is perfect, and the game is really polished, as I didn’t encounter any bugs or crashes.

The grind can be a bit frustrating at times, but the gameplay is very entertaining. As for the visuals, even though they’re charming and have a cute art style, they’re not very memorable and the oceans could’ve looked a bit better.

If you’re looking to live out your childhood fantasies of wearing an eyepatch and plundering on the seven seas, then playing King of Seas is a great way to satisfy that craving.

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Special thanks go to Team17 for providing us with a review code.

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You should play King of Seas if you

• Would love to be a pirate
• Don’t mind its bland visuals
• Enjoy its trading mechanics
• Don’t mind the grinding and the repetitive missions
• Love RPGs and Leveling up your ship
• Don’t mind the lack of an interesting plotline

King of Seas’ Score

7/10