Review: King of Seas (PS4)
King of Seas is an open world adventure RPG where you play as a disgraced captain of a royal lineage who is exiled from their kingdom and takes on the pirate life. The game shares more in common with the classic Sid Meier Pirates series than the recently popular Sea of Thieves in the pirate genre. But can we expect this title to live on as Sid Meier’s classic has 20 years from now?
Probably not, I gave you the general plot in the opening paragraph and that all happens within a matter of minutes. From there the storyline takes a backseat to the gameplay. You have a choice to do mainline missions and progress the story or do side missions and progress your level and ship. Mainline quests will reward you with a cutscene but that’s the only difference between the two types of missions. They are largely uninteresting and share the same framework, using about 4 or 5 mission types to make up the infinite amount of randomly generated quests you can take on. It’s a recipe for repetition, a problem that Sid Meier’s classic also suffers from, but in the year 2021, this stands out more as a glaring issue.
The leveling and progression does little to remedy the issue due to the difficulty and quests scaling with your level. In concept it sounds like a cool feature, but in practice it makes the game feel stagnant and progress not rewarding as a result. There are perma-death difficulty options that need to be unlocked. I believe the experience would be better if the game was played that way and was a shorter experience as a result.
The framework is in place for King of Seas to be a game you come back to on a regular basis but falls short in several ways, ultimately resulting in an adventure best left at sea.
5.75/10
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