Kin' o' Seas feels like a one long grind through an empty sea, swabbin' decks, suckin' on lemons and tossin' th' peels from a crow’s nest at passin' seagulls while waitin' fer somethin' excitin' t' happen. Th' grind it has goin' fer it, hidden under th' cute, colorful graphics, fore momentum and th' promise o' a next sunken ship be just th' worst scourge o' th' seven seas.
Everyone remembers Sid Meier’s Pirates, right? Yeah, this isn’t it. It may draw some similarities, but this is a much more bare-bones, grindy, arcadey, unexciting, ship-to-ship combat focused sea sandbox. There’s also a disturbing lack of swashbuckling and wooing of maidens. Even though the game lets you choose a character, it’s only for story purposes and accompanying cutscenes. You are your ship here.
Story premise is very simple, serviceable, but not really captivating. It does have charming illustrations and character art for its presentation. You pick one of the two available characters, Marylou or Luky, children of the current King of Seas, and get sent on a mission. While you’re chasing ghost ships, your father picks Davy Jones’ locker as his new favorite holiday spot, you’re accused of getting him tickets for it and the Royal Navy tries to send you there with him. Cue pirates dragging your wet, but still kicking bones to their lair, throwing some exposition at you and shooing you on your merry, buccaneering way.
You quickly realize the entire sandbox is made to be grindy and chafing in the long run, like grains of sand stuck in your breeches. It’s the name of the game here in everything you do. From story missions gating content to side quests, ship combat, treasure hunting, fishing and port conquering. You’ll be repeating a small number of activities so many times it’s going to start feeling like you’re being keelhauled with your own ship. How hard that’s going to be you can decide for yourself by picking one of the five difficulties the game presents you, differing only whether you lose your ship and inventory or not. Last one, King of Seas, offers permadeath.
Side quests can be picked up at any port. There’s a few combat oriented ones, but most fall under fetch quests. Fishing can be started at a certain point in-game and is a somewhat good money maker at later fishing levels. But, it is again, a grind, with some types of fish you need to catch to upgrade your fishing rod seemingly having Korean MMO type drop chances. There are treasure ships roaming about, carrying sunken treasure maps that may drop as loot, but after 18 hours and many sunken ships, I haven’t found a single map from them. All the maps I got came from an end game story quest.
Markets and trading also play a role, but each port only has one type of goods in surplus, one in deficit and the market doesn’t really change, making it all overly simplistic. It also feels extremely easy to make money, like there’s pieces of eight instead of droplets raining in those thunderstorms you pass through. Once the game unlocks conquering forts, you can attack and take over any island, making it a pirate port. You can also upgrade them, which is where most of the money will go. But, if you lose the port, it resets everything you’ve purchased and you need to start from scratch. Talk about hornswoggling you out of your hard earned booty. And the fort combat is just another dull task. Ports tend to change allegiances quickly, no matter what level their upgrades are, since they’re apparently made of salted sardines sprinkled with butter and held together by rum and spit.
There’s also a vast expanse of sea between you and your objectives and you’ll be sailing way more than doing anything else. You’ll run into random crates, fishing spots, drowning sailors and some hazards, but apart from ships and ports, that’s all there is to it. It all starts looking samey after a while. The idea of adding and filling in pieces of the map by searching for a cartographer feels novel for the first few times, then it also starts being a chore. All of it feels like very little content stretched out over a needlessly large, procedurally generated map with very little thar she blows moments.
The map has a weird zoom that controls slowly and wonkily with the controller, not even centering the map on you when you open it. And the game still lacks proper support for mouse and keyboard. But, looking at the port and ship menus, it’s obvious it wasn’t really made with them in mind. Another rather annoying thing is how the game instantly spawns a few military ships whenever you attack a port, while your ships are usually nowhere to be seen. And there’s tons of other little annoying mechanics just rubbing shoulders and cackling with the grind.
It doesn’t all feel like you’re marooned on a deserted island with a single coconut tree. Ship combat, as arcadey as it is, is done well and feels very smooth. It’s easy to learn, hard to master. There are 5 ships on offer, from a lowly sloop to the mighty galleon. They all have different stats and once bought can be freely swapped at any port you own. Simple controls with only three sail stages, wind directions and three health bars, for your crew, sails and hull feel right at home here, allowing for some fast paced piracy, plundering and scuttling of ships. There’s no morale in play here, the crew are all old salts and just happy to be pirates, win or lose.
Combine that with an excellent and well thought out ship parts upgrade system that even changes your ship visually with every part, an interesting perks system allowing you to become, among other things, a pirate voodoo princess, and a sizeable set of combat skills wrapped into magic and science and you get a very shiver me timbers part of the game. There’s even a great in-game way to reset your perk points and I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that one.
Having no complex designs or mechanics doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad thing. But, most things here feel overly simplified and toned down to a minimum. Like battening down the hatches before a coming storm. Great combat and upgrade systems don’t outweigh the shallow trading, repetitive side quests, tediousness of tasks, and most of all, the grind and gating of content behind it. It looks and feels like a promising pirate sandbox, but it’s not particularly rousing at the moment. Replayability is also an issue. You can’t continue playing after the story, which is a bonkers decision, since the game lends itself to that amazingly. If you start a new difficulty, you start from scratch and that’s a very mind-numbing promise. If you’re looking for a simple pirate life, a ship combat game and don’t mind the intense grind, mutiny on this review and go play it. Otherwise, make it walk the plank.
PC specs: It was smooth sailing all the way on an i7-7700K, RTX2070, 32GB of RAM and an SSD.
Zitat:
Take a peek inside the Cabinet of Curiosities if you like to walk off the beaten path and only sometimes return to the main roads. Join the group as well if you want to follow some of my other musings. You might find something worth exploring. And if you do, thank you for the visit.
