A game made by developers whose name is also indicative of their recent game releases, Rare releases a game that has been highly anticipated ever since its announcement. Sea of Thieves is an open-world action adventure game with a strong focus on multiplayer. It focuses on literal piracy and plundering with some of the best water systems till date. With a lot of expectations from this game, players have been anticipating this game and looking forward to it, especially Xbox One owners. So, does Sea of Thieves deliver or is it just a gorgeous treasure chest that is filled with nothing, let’s find out.
Sea of Thieves has you play as a pirate who with his other pirate friends must find and plunder treasure. There’s not really a story in the game other than that. The game focuses more on the gameplay and exploration and discovery. As a pirate, the sea is yours to conquer and conquering the high seas with your friends is fun. Everyone is assigned a job like steering, handling the sails, navigation and manning the cannons. Navigation is not as easy as it sounds since it has to be done by keeping an eye on the map from the map table, finding landmarks and using the compass to sail to your destination. It is fun and gets your whole crew involved.
Another fun thing to do with your crew is to emote and sing and dance. Playing the accordion with your crew while someone dances is quite the fun time. Sadly, there’s not much variety to this. Now quests and missions are handed out to you which range from fetch quests to finding loot quests with not a lot of variety in the types of quest available. Once a mission is chosen, the crew votes on whether or not they want to do that quest and then a captain is chosen and off you go on your quest. While the sailing and ship combat system is fun it really lacks any sort of depth which means that over time, there isn’t much to master.
The visuals of the game are something to behold. The cartoony pseudorealistic art style is excellently done with phenomenal lighting that does a great job in setting and keeping the light hearted tone of the game throughout. The water physics and system is one of the best I’ve ever seen in any videogame to date. The waves are affected as they crash into your ship, or when they’re crashing into the side of an island. The way the numerous ripples interact with each other is really realistic but the best part of this water system is the way the lighting system interacts with it. The top of the wave is slightly translucent allowing light to travel more as compared to the absolute top and the bottom of the wave, just like in real life. The light blue translucent light coming through it on a bright sunny day or the more orange, ember like light during the evenings, it really is a sight to behold.
Audio wise the sound effects like the wind, waves crashing into your ship and weapons do a phenomenal job of making you feel like you’re truly there but the lack variety in some of these sounds means that it can get monotonous after a while. Also the voice work wherever present is abysmal and for a game with a pirate setting is not done well at all. The soundtrack, when present is great. It gets you hyped up, makes you feel like a true pirate but sadly its presence is not that pronounced or frequent which is quite a shame.
Sea of Thieves is a visually stunning game with the audio bar the voices that match its visual beauty. However, the lack of content can clearly be seen after a few hours of gameplay and while it is a lot of fun to play, it gets stale due to the lack of depth and content. However, Rare has promised that there is a lot more to come and with a few more updates, I feel this game can truly be a great pirate game.
