Sea King

Genre: Arcade / Party Game

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Sea King is a family-friendly Arcade-style Party Game where players pilot a ship on the open seas, competing with up to three other ships in various game modes. This game was released in 2019 on PC and Nintendo Switch.

Surprisingly, for a $5 budget game, Sea King is visually very nice – the ships are all intricately designed and boast a lot of personality to them, the water is gorgeous, the little animations that are here (like ships sinking or a massive shark that swims around and gobbles up ships) are wonderful.

When it comes to the sound, I wouldn’t say what’s here is bad so much as… misjudged. The music is acoustic fare that’s somewhat fitting for a Pirate-y sorta’ game… but the relaxed, mellow quality of that music isn’t really fitting for faster-paced Arcade-style action. The quiet nature of the music contrasts greatly with the extremely enthusiastic pirate-y narrator, who is constantly shouting over matches with various pirate-isms (of the “shiver me timbers!” variety). Because this element stands out so much, it gets annoying quickly, which is a shame because you can tell the folks behind the game put a lot of work into nailing this part of the presentation.

As for the gameplay, players can steer their ship in a direction by moving the left stick in that direction, and they can fire in one of four directions by pressing the face button on the controller that corresponds to that part of the ship. As such, players will be steering and avoiding cannon fire while also trying to keep in mind which button goes to which cannon on their own ship as their orientation changes.

It’s a simple premise, but it works fairly well, and there are quite a lot of different game modes to enhance the experience. Some, such as a game mode that requires players to fight while being pulled by a siren or be the first to balance a bird on their lookout, are pretty terrible. However, most of these game modes are solid, and add a lot of good variety to the game. “Shark Pong” has players fighting each other while fending off a giant shark, Vortex Royale and Kraken Hugs are different takes on a Battle Royale mode, and Catch the Flu plays sorta’ like tag. All in all, there’s a decent enough amount of variety in these game modes to keep things interesting for a while.

Sea King isn’t especially deep, and it has a few areas that could have been better-executed, but overall this is a solid Party Game, and it’s a steal for $5. If you’re looking to add another game to your Party Game rotation, definitely give this one a look.

tl;dr – Sea King is an Arcade-style Party Game where players pilot ships trying to blast each other away with canon fire. While it’s not especially deep and the pirate-y announcer can be a bit overbearing, the visuals are excellent, the gameplay is good and there’s a healthy variety of game modes. For $5, this is a game well worth adding to your Party Game lineup.

Grade: B

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