King of Seas

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG

Players: 1

.

Review:

King of Seas is a Top-Down ship-based Action-RPG released in 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This game puts players in the role of the heir to an island kingdom who finds themselves framed for the murder of the king, and must align themselves with pirates to fight against the royal navy that now hunts them and reveal the true culprit behind the king’s murder.

The presentation here is mostly pretty good, with the game largely taking place in the top-down perspective a great distance away from the action, depicting ships, islands, settlements and so on using 3D visuals that look good but mostly not too impressive. The water at least does look quite good here. The game has a fitting soundtrack that works for this sort of seafaring adventure, though it’s nothing memorable. Really, the one place this game is the biggest let-down is the absence of voice acting, since this is a very story-heavy game, and characters are often talking at you while you’re in the middle of maneuvering your ship or engaging in combat.

On that note, the gameplay here is fairly simple, having you controlling the speed and direction of your ship, ordering cannons to fire on the port or starboard side, directing your crew to begin repairs when safe, and picking up salvage and other finds, delivering them to ports, with a decent merchant trade system in place for different locales.

This all works well enough, and if what you’re looking for is a decent piratey adventure, this will do the trick, but know that this game can be a bit slow-paced at times, and it can get to be repetitive fairly quick. As such, what will determine how much you enjoy this game is largely whether you can enjoy the sort of back-and-forth grind of the game, taking goods back and forth, engaging ships in naval battles where you’ll largely circle one another, and repeating that process.

Ultimately, King of Seas doesn’t do anything especially unique or novel in its naval combat or its seafaring-focused adventuring, but it is nevertheless a decent entry in its own niche within the genre, if a somewhat repetitive and slow-paced one. If you’re looking for a simple game to immerse yourself in a piratey world, this may do the trick for you.

tl;dr – King of Seas is a Top-Down ship-based Action-RPG that has players navigating a ship to cart around supplies and engage other ships in combat. It does this sort of gameplay well enough, though it can be a bit slow-paced and repetitive. Still, if you want to immerse yourself in a piratey adventure, this may be the sort of game you’re looking for.

Grade: C+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Andy Miller, Exlene, Johannes, Ilya Zverev, Connor Armstrong, Eli Goodman, Kristoffer Wulff, Stov, and Gabriel Coronado-Medina. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}