Game Review - King of Seas

Game Review: King of Seas by by 3DClouds and published by Team17
Score: +3/-10

We got King of Seas free from GOG on 16-Dec-2022 when they were giving away free games every three days.

“Cannon shots echo on the seven seas as on the horizon the sun rises on a new dawn of pirates. Drop your moorings, unfold the sails and launch yourself into the heart of the storm shaping your empire. The murder of your father will not be forgiven."

King of Seas is an Action Role playing game set in a deadly procedurally generated pirate world. In a ferocious plot you will fight to regain what has been taken away and embark on an epic adventure in a fantastic world, filled with battles, lost islands and treasures. A universe full of amazing characters and breathtaking missions will keep you anchored as you strive to become the king of all pirates.

King of Seas has a polished look but sadly gameplay nuances just kill it. If all you want to do is sail around in a relaxed way, collecting flotsam, rescuing shipwrecked crew, maybe doing some trade between the towns, then this game is good. If you want to do the story or missions, then it's lousy.

If they had better mechanics, this game would have been a winner.

• +1 Overall a nice fun look for the world, and handling of ship sailing is quite smooth and easy. This is pretty much the only thing this game does right and well.
• -1 You can only save progress when you dock at a settlement. This is quite irritating because a quest can take you literally all the way across the map and there's a big space in between with nowhere to dock.
• +1 Lots of things to do on the open seas although there's little variety.
• -1 There's maybe too much because you can just keep running round and round collecting things. It's easier and faster than questing or even sinking ships for booty.
• -1 Most of your levelling will actually come from this. Sinking a ship might get you 120 XP but shooting explosive barrels in the water or picking up loot might be 30-40. There's no concept at all of commensurate risk/reward.
• Just picking up random loot this way can make you a lot of money, and in a less tedious manner than working the market or any other activity.
• This means you can buy the biggest ship and keep doing it then keep shopping for RNG generated items in stores.
• -1 But this is actually extremely bad: You don't need to play any other aspect of the game except picking up loot and shopping.
• -1 And character progress because you went shopping is highly unsatisfying, especially considering the no-effort way you got that money.
• -1 Even if you didn't mind improvement in this way, all that levelling and gearing is actually quite futile because the ships around you also level up and gear up. You're always behind in the arms war and you are not in fact improving at all when everyone else improves at least as fast, if not probably faster.
• +1 Good attempt to let you customizer many aspects of the ship and crew with randomly generated gear in the style originally made popular by Diablo -- that is, adjectives and rarity modifying stats.
• -1 Unfortunately the system seems to have little or no rhyme or reason to it. Gear rated at a higher level and value have nothing apparent to justify it and sometimes have stats that appear grossly worse than supposedly inferior gear. Some modifiers have no indication of what they do at all, if they do anything.
• -1 Combat is clunky
• You have to lead the target while moving and the AI does this much better than you do.
• -1 Randomly generated missions are terrible
• For escort missions, the description is typically misleading. You are told to protect a ship... but it never gets attacked. Obviously the best type of mission to do.
• Kill missions are the worst because fighting is clunky and the total time required is long because of the sailing, fighting, and possibly having to disengage because you are too close to a port and come under fire from other NPC elements. And you go back, the enemy has healed up and possibly levelled up as well.
• -1 Exploration is dumb.
• You only know where your pirate home base is and where the government castle is. Everything else on the map remains blank unless you buy maps.
• Yes, even ports you've docked at are not marked on your map.
• But hey, if you have a quest to Fedex something to a port, you know exactly where it is thanks to the quest marker!