Creating a pirate-based game where players can go about the seas and fight for plunder and glory is what developer 3DClouds and publisher Team17 set out to do with King of Seas. They definitely made a game with all the boxes checked off, but as far as an entertaining value is concerned, it seemed to miss the mark. Adding what seemed to be a bit of realism to the mechanics while presenting a story of pure fantasy, this game had more up’s and down’s than the waves themselves when it comes to having fun playing it.

Story

As the child of the king, it is your duty to understand and know how to handle the important aspects of running your kingdom. Today you prove that you understand the role of a merchant and how to sail a ship with a simple delivery to a nearby port city. During your journey, a terrible fate befalls the king by the dark powers of magic! It isn’t until you are returning home that you are stopped by the royal guards and accused of being behind the attack and thus sunken by order of the head guard!

Somehow surviving the wreckage and saved by none other than a pirate, your new life begins. As an outcast from your kingdom home and accused murderer of your own father, you are left with no choice but to live the life of a pirate. Through the ways of your new teachings, you must find a way to prove your innocence and bring justice to the real murderer of your father!

Gameplay

You will spend pretty much all of your time on your boat and the controls are pretty straight forward. Raise or lower sails, boat turning controls, and left or right cannons. You will also be able to do other aspects, such as fixing your boat while out at sea, but these will require materials and for the boat to come to a complete stop.

At first, it seems that you can just sail around a limited area that helps guide you to your current ongoing quest. Shortly after becoming a pirate, the traveling takes a bit more of a dangerous turn as ships will now randomly attack you. But, on that same note, you can also randomly attack other ships, even if they are passive to you. When you sink a boat they will drop some materials to collect, but if your boat is the one that is sunk you will drop whatever you have. You can sail back to where you sank to collect what you dropped, but some items may still be lost - depending on your difficulty.

Picking up random items in the waters, including stranded passengers and materials, you simply have to sail over top of them. You need to be wary though because items are kind of small on the screen and if you run over a gunpowder barrel then it will explode, damaging your ship.

As you make progress, you will start earning options to customize your ship. This is a nice touch that lets the player personalize their ship as they like it. Plus, I enjoy seeing the return of earning what you want rather than just making it a pre-order bonus or something you can simply purchase.

Generally, you will just be following the questline to get through this game. It is rather boring at first, but once you complete a good amount of quests you can open the map up further. Then you can see that there isn’t really too much new to do in different areas and it is a lot of the same stuff, just with a longer sail time to get over to it.

Visuals and Audio

I thought the game was aesthetically pleasing, despite being a bit cartoony. Each island had its own shape and design with a few of them having unique sculptures or cities on them to help them stand out from the rest. They did maintain an appealing visual aspect throughout the game.

As far as the music and sound effects go, I would say that they are fitting. The adventure music could be a bit dull and almost seem nonexistent at times, but I was neither impressed nor let down by the audio choices throughout the game.

What Could Be Better

It would have been nice to see more aspects in the game when it came to things to fight against. Ship fighting is fun and all, but it would have been cool to run into something else. You have the whole sea to work with after all.

Other than that, I am not sure what I would have liked to have made the game better really. It just felt a bit lackluster to play through and more content in the form of gameplay aspects would have improved the overall experience.

Conclusion

King of Seas just isn’t the type of pirate game that can hold my attention long. I ended up getting through this game by playing in a bunch of short game sessions, none of which were very entertaining to get through. I would say that it has a pretty good start to the game, as the demo originally caught my attention, but it didn’t seem to get better from there like I was hoping. Maybe this could be the pirate game for a more casual player, but it just didn’t cut it for me.