Sea of Thieves Review: A Game That If Given More Content Will Be Great
After a month of playing Sea of Thieves, I have been going back and forth on my thoughts of the game. This game was developed by Rare Studios who is mostly known for Banjo Kazooie. Sea of Thieves is an open world PVP game that has the players play as pirates in a crew with friends or by yourself. The player can go on a quest for gold and fight other crews in ship battles. All of this is basically the entire game, yet the game is still fun.
The game at its core is a fun time that does require having friends to play with, but you can still have fun by yourself sometimes. The idea of the game is great on paper and having three alliances the players can work on being Gold Hoarders, Merchant Alliance, and the Order of Souls. The quest for each alliance is different which is great, but I still feel like there isn’t really a big difference between why a player should choose to focus on one over the other. Each alliance gives you different items but other than cosmetics, there isn’t a point on really focusing on one or the other.
The quests also don’t have that much depth to them at all. Gold Hoarders quests are just going to an island and find a chest; Order of Souls’ quests are just fighting Skeleton bosses on islands, and the Merchant Alliance are just quests to find items on the island. The quests get repetitive after a while. One thing I have to say though is that the game does offer NPC sunken ships where you can explore them underwater and they sometimes offer treasures. I actually found this more fun than doing quests as the rewards weren’t guaranteed or the same plus the ships being in the middle of the ocean made it more intense with sharks and the possibility of the Kraken.
The fighting mechanics work well in the game (both person versus person or boat versus boat). The guns handle well and the swords work great. I see no real problems with them. The ship battles are fun, but just maneuvering the ship is difficult which makes the game actually feel slightly more realistic. I do believe the crew limit needs to be raised to six people, as running the Galleon – which is the big ship – requires more people to run smoothly for sailing or battles.
If I had to compare this game to another, I think Sea of Thieves is in the same boat – pun not-intended – that No Man’s Sky was in. The game was released, but there wasn’t enough content to warrant a 60 dollar release. I know the developers have kind of teased some future DLC and stuff, but I feel that some of that content should have been there from the start. I enjoy this game, but I also recognize there needs to be more to this game. I think if we give the game a year and if Rare plays their cards right, this title could be a solid Game of the year contender for sure.
