Sea Of Thieves
In Sea Of Thieves, you get to live the fantasy life of a Pirate from way back in the day when Pirating meant hunting for buried treasure and getting drunk. Talking of drunk, the game starts with you waking up all hazy in a bit of a dive bar on some exotic island. If you’re playing with friends (which is how the game is supposed to be) they’ll be waking up as well. If you’ve chosen the solo route, you’ll be, well, alone.
If you just stagger out of the bar into the sunlight, you’ll miss out on plundering bananas (health packs), wood (health packs for your ship) and canon balls (duh), which can be found in the barrels. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of barrels on your way to the dock.
There will also be some merchants (don’t bother, you have no gold yet) and representatives from the three guilds, Gold Hoarders, Order of Souls, and Merchant Alliance. These guys are the bread and butter of the game, they give you at first (and sell you later at higher levels) quests for you to complete, from digging up treasure chests at the x marks the sport location, to defeating a skeleton boss to delivering some chickens. The rewards for each depend on the level of quest.
Do enough of these quests for all three factions and you’ll open up the end game. But alas, that is a massive grind away.
Yes grind, and in single player the grind is all the more real. Essentially Sea Of Thieves is a go here and do the same thing over and over game. Which is why Sea of Thieves is best played with one or more of your mates. Then it becomes a voyage of hilarity – if you have mates like mine. Getting distracted is the best way to play Sea Of Thieves.
Always have someone keeping an eye out, because there is everything from barrels of bananas/wooden planks/cannon balls floating waiting to be plundered to actual ship wreaks waiting to be explored, too rumored sunken temples to explore. Ship wreaks are my favourite thing to find on the high seas. Diving into a wreak is extremely disorientating but fun. It’s only not fun then the wreak is empty of any goodies. It’s also not fun when you find a message in a bottle but decide to keep that till the next time you play but when you fire up the game next the message has gone!
But I digress. Doing anything in deep water is dangerous, because you can like, drown, but more importantly, as my mate discovered at one wreak, there are sharks. Oh shit I’m being attacked by a shark my mate screamed into the headset. Wait, there are sharks I exclaimed excitedly right before getting eaten by one.
Death however is never final, and you’ll soon rejoin your crew mates for some more fun.
And sharks, well sharks can be killed. Just remember, you gun works underwater.
So the key thing is to make the journey a blast, no matter how much longer that may make the grind. Sea Of Thieves is about having fun, from exploring to getting drunk and falling off your ship, the possibilities are endless if you enjoy hanging out online with your mates.
If your mates are all just serious like, then Sea of Thieves is just going to be a massive grind with company. Because if there is one thing Sea of Thieves is lacking, it’s content. My mate and I were randomly spawned on this massive island after we sunk our ship. Exploring the island was fun, after climbing a long ladder my mate found a cannon and tried to pivot it to shoot me, then he tried to fire it at an over hanging rock ledge to get me with the blast (no friendly fire however), so I suggested he let me climb into the cannon and he could fire me point blank at the rock. He miss-aimed and shot me onto the (what looked like it was) inaccessible top of the island. Up here there were pulleys and platforms, all of which didn’t work, lots of lush vegetation, stone faces and one lone skeleton. And this sums up the game at present. It’s a world of possibilities, just waiting to be filled with possibilities.
Which, if Rare does it right, could be a great thing.
Imagine a world where you can have a blast with your friends just doing basic shit. Then a month or three later Rare release some more features, much like Rockstar continue to do with GTA5, and you have exciting new stuff to do, and this begins a semi regular update cycle, keeping you hooked on the gradual grind whilst waiting for the next update.
That would be genius.
But at present, Sea of Thieves seems a little like a great way to boost the XBox Game Pass feature, by being the first of many Microsoft games to be released for free, on launch day. Soon to be followed up by State Of Decay II and presumably Forza Horizon IV later this year.
Hopefully Rare have big plans for Sea Of Thieves because I absolutely love the game and would love to slowly grind through some regular content updates throughout the year. In fact just writing this review has me pining to get back on the waves to see what I can find in the far distance.
Rating: R18PG Parental guidance is recommended for younger viewers.
GAMEGUIDE rating:
