Murder! Chaos! Pirates! King of Seas has it all! This high seas adventure from 3DClouds and publisher Team 17 hits all the right buttons for a swashbuckling adventure. There are very few pirate games around, notably Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and Pirates! Gold, but aside from those, the genre is pretty sparse, so a new one is always welcome.
As the son (or daughter) of the King, Luky is learning to sail. But just as his boat returns from your first voyage, Luky finds that his father has been murdered and he’s being framed! It’s time to flee! Eventually, you’ll find yourself in a den of pirates! Luckily, they’re kindly folk and the old king treated them fairly, so they’ll help you find justice on the high seas and gain your rightful place as king!
The plot for King of Seas is decent. Characters are hilarious caricatures with over-the-top dialogue and wild artwork, but the storyline is solid. This is a game that jumps back in time, weaving together adventure, magic, ghosts, and more to create a story straight out of a pirate fantasy. Gameplay consists of primarily sailing and a bit of menu-based resource management. Initially, you start out with a single ship, but you can cobble together an extensive fleet of ships to switch between for various tasks. Sailing is straightforward. Raise the sails, go. Lower the sails, stop. There are three levels of sails to reach maximum speed, and the faster you go, the wider your turning radius. Your guns are primarily broadside cannons of various types and you can switch on the fly with the d-pad. You’ll also get special attacks, like a flame attack that can hit opponents directly in front of you, distracting them so they turn right into a full broadside blast. It’s a neat system and the physics are fairly realistic. It’s challenging to fight in a broadside ship battle without taking blasts yourself and to start off, you’re pretty weak.
As you play, you’ll wander around the local seas, finding treasure and items everywhere. These include upgrades to pretty much every part of your ship, including the hull, sails, crew, and more. Upgrades are like equipment in an RPG, adding to your stats and power and giving you a significant edge in battle. Pretty soon, your little sloop is a vicious fighting weasel (because it’s small and mean). Sinking ship after ship doesn’t put you in people’s good books though and as you gain levels, you gain notoriety, with pirate hunters chasing you around the sea. If you’re sunk, don’t worry. On normal difficulty, you respawn at the pirate HQ and don’t lose your gear. Jack up the difficulty and you’re in for rough seas though, with a complete loss of cargo every time, so be sure you’re ready!
When you hit ports, you can take on missions, sell goods, and fix your ship (though with repair kits you can fix it at sea). Trading goods between ports is one way to make money without killing, and fulfilling missions nets you a wide variety of bonuses. However, if you die while you’re on a mission, you fail it, so don’t monkey around too much! Get into a fight within visual range of a port and you’re in trouble however, as the port will close to you for commerce and repairs. On the open sea, everyone is fair game, but you’ve got to mind your manners when polite company is about!
Once you get a feel for the game, things start to pick up. Main plot elements and missions have you everywhere, all over the map and cartographers help you to fill in the gaps on that map for a price. You can always just wing it too. Random items reappear from time to time, allowing you to replenish your goods and keep up. There’s even a bit of fishing to be had if that’s your bag! However, King of Seas is definitely a sea-based game. There’s no land combat, nothing but talk and menus at the port and its back out to sea with you. And it’s not all gentle breezes and fair maidens on these seas.
King of Seas has a few flaws but the big one is pacing. Sure, it’s super fun to go around blasting ships and delivering goods, but, well, you have to sail there. At around 10 knots. In other words, it takes a long, long time to get places, and if you die, you’re back at the home base travelling all that way again to do whatever you were doing. It’s not only frustrating, it’s tedious. Sure, there’s some rip roarin pirate background music and the gentle sway of the waves to keep you company, but honestly, about half your gameplay is sailing places waiting to do stuff, like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker if the ocean was a hundred times larger and you couldn’t really get out of your ship. And while sailing is relaxing, it’s also fairly boring. It’s a shame that there’s no way to really heavily accelerate the boat unrealistically, because there’s just a dash too much realism here.
Another major issue is the visual design. The default view for King of Seas is quite far back, showing you as a tiny dot on a big ocean. At this range, you don’t really see the majesty of your sailing vessel, the detailed changes that show as you upgrade sails and other items, or any of the close-in graphical details of combat. You can handily zoom in with the d-pad though, making the ship take up most of the screen. Sadly, this creates a problem where if you’re in combat, you can no longer see your opponent because you’re busy admiring the ships and the viewable area and fixed camera angle don’t allow for view of the battle. Every battle forces you to zoom out and you can’t really enjoy the excellent visuals. The same goes for sailing around the landscape. Islands are filled with neat ruins and other things, but if you zoom in to see them, you sail past treasure and other items. It’s a lose-lose, especially with a fixed camera.
Now both of those are pretty significant issues, but that’s not to say that King of Seas isn’t fun. It absolutely is. It’s so easy to get lost in just sailing about and fighting whoever you feel like that it’s genuinely surprising. But there are a couple other issues you should be prepared for. First is the text size. It’s small. Like Honey I Shrunk The Kids small and there is no way to increase it. Because of this, it’s incredibly difficult to read some of the stylized text in the game, and with the fun light-hearted dialogue, that’s a shame. On the sea, this issue becomes even worse and while the game identifies what ships are, between the tiny font and the motion blur, it’s nearly impossible to read what a ship is designated. I have a 55” screen and was wearing my glasses. This shouldn’t be an issue. Visual issues also crop up in zoomed out mode, where there are frame drops and stutters at random on the Switch. They’re not a big deal and resolve themselves quickly, but it’s still distracting and kills the immersion a bit. There’s been an update during the course of this review and it seems to have fixed this for the most part, but don’t be surprised to see the occasional minor visual glitch.
The overall visual design is great in King of Seas. It’s light, fun, silly, and a bit weird as well, and it just adds to the charm and flavor of the game. Zooming in on your ship and watching the sails fly as you slice through the waves is simply outstanding, and there are stranger things out in the seas, tentacles rising from the depths, volcanoes, and even ghost ships, so you never know what you may run into! The map is simply gigantic so there’s lots of room for new adventures! Accompanying the music is a fun adventurous soundtrack that gets the salt pumping through your blood and you can almost feel the wind and excitement. There are several solid tracks and while you won’t be rushing out to buy the soundtrack, it is quite good and perfect for King of Seas. Sound design is also decent with the expected creaks and groans of the ship, the sound of the seas, and lots of other stuff tossed in. All in all, the audio video package here is quite solid even if there are a few hiccups.
While King of Seas might not be the most exciting game for everyone, it’s a breath of fresh sea air. Zipping around and ambushing passing ships is a genuine delight and the storyline, while not wildly original, is quite fun too. Even the characters all seem to be having a rip roaring good time through a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously and shouldn’t. While the speed of your ships could be much better (or the distances shorter) and the text could definitely use some resizing options, the overall experience of King of Seas is fun and ignoring those few barnacles that the deck boy missed isn’t all that hard. If you’re the patient sort that sees trips as journeys rather than just destinations, this might be the game for you. But if you don’t want to sit around waiting for your ship to get where it’s going again after being sunk several times, you might not be patient enough to sail these high seas. Either way, King of Seas is a slow and steady game of gradual growth over time and it definitely gets better as you discover its secrets.
This review was based on a digital copy of King of Seas provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well in both. King of Seas is also available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on Steam.
