A new pirate game promises great time exploring and pillaging the boundless seas and islands, but forgets how lonely the experience can get
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Sea of Thieves is ambitious to say the least. It is essentially a large multiplayer game where you play a pirate exploring the seas and plundering other pirate ships for booty. Sounds like a great idea, especially when you think of how popular pirate-based media has been over the last few years.
You start of with a little sequence that shows you the various factions as the game loads in the background with some good music. Once the game loads, you can choose your pirate type, and a suitable look for him or her. You can also choose the type of boat you want to be on - we suggest jumping head first into a full crew galleon.
The playable part of the game begins with you waking up in a bar on some nondescript island. You can talk to various people around town and buy treasure maps. Don’t worry, the first ones are free. Chances are that new players are bundled up with you and you’ll have to work together to figure the game out.
Sea of Thieves could have made it easier with a small tutorial, but all you are going to get is a pop-up once in a while, telling you something vital. There is no information on how to work the boat, how to find treasure, how to fight or anything that is necessary to play the game. Be prepared to be screamed at, if you are teamed with a more capable crew.
Once you figure out how to make the boat move, finding islands using the map are fairly easy. However, once there, finding treasure can be tough, especially figuring where it is hidden, as the game does little to teach you the basics. Ship combat that involves blowing up other ships with your cannon is fun, but it is spaced too far apart. The combat on land with skeletons on the other hand, is boring and repetitive. Sure, you can switch it up with new weapons, but it is essentially the same thing as the previous island and the island previous to that. Once in a while, you will encounter a boss skeleton, but they are also easily defeated.
The game does look really good and reminds us a lot of the design of Monkey Island. In fact, the skeleton villains in the game seems like more than just a passing homage of the granddaddy of all pirate videogames. The music and the environment sounds make you feel the adventure of a pirate life. The water, in particular, is probably the most standout feature of the game. It looks gorgeous and terrifyingly vast.
This vastness is also the reason Sea of Thieves fails, considering the game is free for 14 days. With Xbox Gamepass, it should have been filled to the brim, but it is a while before you run into other pirates, and chances are, the brief encounter will end up with you dead, your boat sunk or both.
Sea of Thieves has potential, but despite a lot of people on the game right now, the actual feeling that you are playing a massive multiplayer game is lost. It also requires you to form a crew of regulars, which may be hard for people, who don’t already game with each other. The tutorials are useless and the variety of gameplay is also lacking. If they had some story-driven content, we feel people would be more inclined to play the game often. As it stands, the game is a shiny expensive dud.
Sea of Thieves
Rating: 2/5
Developer: Rare
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Platform: Pc, XBOX
Price: Rs 3,874
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