Sea of Thieves is great fun and an extremely unique adventure sandbox battle game.
You get a genuine sense of adventure when you set out with your crew in search of buried treasure and the excitement grows when you go looking for trouble in the form of battles vs other players online.
The graphics are nothing short of stunning, in fact the water effects are probably the best ever seen in a game. It wouldn’t surprise me if the work was done to create the water effects and then the developers (Rare) just thought. “maybe we should tack a game on this somehow”.
The absence of a story and any substantial levelling up of your character, weapons or ship other than cosmetically is a slight disappointment and worries me about the future playability of the game once the initial buzz wears off. On the other hand, being a new player or a casual gamer you may find that this is appealing as you are always on a fairly level playing field with the opposition.
The game relies instead on powerful moments, like when you ram another ship and in a very “Jack Sparrow” way run up the bowsprit onto their vessel and exchange blows in an epic sword fight.
Communication is key to winning as you play, you’ll need to use the in game chat to get the full experience as when they are in proximity you can hear opposition pirates and chat to them, it may get you out of an unwinnable fight, or it might at the very least let you express your feelings about said fight.
The few times we’ve played we’ve had no issues with Xbox to Xbox communication but had a few bugs when we start adding PCs to the mix. This is an amazing feature by the way, the fact that it is cross platform is a really big deal and it’s so good that games are going in that direction. We had a game going with two pc’s and two Xboxes and the game itself didn’t skip a beat, it was only the coms that were buggy.
If you have played games like Destiny you would know all about “The Raid” and Sea of Thieves has their own version of this where you can earn heaps of loot. The developers have always said that this is the base game and they expect the game to grow beyond this initial release so if they live up to that idea I think the game will be great but if not we could be playing this hard for a few months and then discarding it when a new shinier toy comes along.
Sea of Thieves is great fun for now, but the real test will be in a few weeks from now, to rate it right now though it’s a 4 out of 5.
