Plundering for Booty With Ye Mateys
User Rating: 7 | Sea of Thieves XONE
A beautiful, bright, hilarious, persistent grinding game that's definitely a better experience when played with a comfortable squad. To start with the graphics, they're simply stunning. The game has a comical, cartoonish look that you tend to forget when zoned into those hypnotic waves while waiting massive amounts of real world time just to sail from island to island for pixelalted booty but what's most rewarding about the visual aspect are the small things that catch you every once in a while like the fact that a bright red crystal on the top of a captains chest (when angled just right in the sun) will actually reflect a realistic redish tone, sometimes directly in the player's face. Moving on to the mechanics, to keep it short and sweet, maneuvering the boat is easy enough, especially with a crew. You get the rhythm and things fly by. However, the combat is stiff and mostly a struggle to operate. Skeletons on islands defending chests seem to operate the engine to its fullest potential which seems to be a tripe when you're halfway struggling to pull bananas to heal after taking 2 undodgeable blunder buss shots to the dome. But thanks to a, what I like to call, 'forever respawn', you constantly come back at your boat ready for more plundering which eases up on some negative weight attributed to the stiff combat system. The biggest negative would have to be the price. Goodness. $60 for what feels, runs and grinds like a regular $30 game. If State of Decay 2, A Way Out, and even PUBG can suffice it, they should too. On the contrary, this is supposedly because future DLC for the game is going to be free which is, understandably, a decent concept especially in the current scenario of companies running heavily off of Season Pass and Microtransaction operations, but this concept loses positivity for a long time until enough DLC is dropped to help accommodate a $60 price tag. Until then, GamePass seems to be your cheapest route to play the game at $10 a month on Xbox Live. In the end, if you don't mind games that grind, love operating group processes with a set of close friends, or the niche of Pirate environment, then this game is easily up your alley. Or at least if you already have GamePass or are gamesharing with a friend, give it a shot.
