Review for Sea of Thieves. Game for PC and Xbox One, the video game was released on 20/03/2018
What Sea of Thieves? Easy, it's what will bring you back toschool anxiety. By this we mean that sincere feeling that took hold of your soul when, in the hard days spent on the benches, you felt the physical and psychological need to go home as soon as possible to throw yourself on a particular video game. That anxiety that gripped you while you listened to the professors, perhaps even looking them in the eye, but constantly thinking about a new area of the game to discover, a new tactic to be adopted against a powerful enemy.
We are talking about this. Nothing else.
Sea of Thieves is a game that goes out of its way to be free like the pirates and the setting of which it is composed. We can't frame it in any genre and in this review we don't even want to. The game of Rare it cannot be inserted into any macro-category and from each of them indeed, it slips away like a sloop on a favorable tide.
It will be good then to describe "how it is made" instead of putting labels on it: Sea of Thieves tries to represent an oceanic world in which they live crews of weird and not very credible pirates constantly looking for treasures to unearth, islands to conquer and loot to move. An ocean full of places to explore, to know and - above all - to survive the pitfalls.
To fully appreciate the title it is preferable to play with at least one friend. It is in fact in a group that this video game gives its best even considering all the mechanics it is steeped in to the bone. We'll have to choose a ship to begin with. For now the game only allows you to choose between galleon and sloop but your choice will prove to be fundamental because if you believe that a galleon can be more useful to you or make you less attractive in the open sea you are wrong. The difference in this game is the crew, both in quantity and quality.
A galleon will be better tamed in four as there are many more sails to hoist or dismiss as needed, an even bigger and heavier anchor, more compartments below deck to defend, more cannons to load and so on. Not to mention that it is extremely slower than its younger brother, the sloop, which only takes two men to get to full speed smoothly and more quickly.
Beyond these considerations we must say that in a gaming landscape that is short of ideas, Sea of Thieves can easily be considered a hope. Indeed let's face it: Sea of Thieves is the new hope of video games. We are talking about a game competitive at the highest levels, anxiogenic like very few others (I challenge you to have the ship full of treasures and not worry about sighting the sails of some other player on the horizon) but above all exhilarating to unexpected levels.
Playing, dancing, getting drunk: these are just some of the things Sea of Thieves allows us to do. While one crewman plays, another might dance, yet another drink to drunk, and another might steer the ship (thankless task in the middle of a party).
What we mean is that Sea of Thieves lets you breathe the sea breeze, that of the most beautiful summers of your life. We are back to being carefree young people playing with it and our editorial team has also put on a crew of its own, albeit with catastrophic results caused by a nice Creak. Although the first impact the main mechanics of the game, (i.e. obtaining treasure maps, contracts to smuggle goods or liberating skeleton-infested islands), may seem repetitive, with the passage of time and experience the missions will gradually become more complex and our appearance will change according to the goods we can buy.
Much in fact will be based on appearance: looking very experienced and well armed to another player who may decide to steal our loot will make all the difference. Why in Sea of Thieves the main objective is not to complete this or that mission but not to be robbed of the riches that our ship hosts. Be warned: it's full of smargias and throat cutters out there that could land you on the ship of the damned, a galleon that the developers have set up as a "waiting room" for respawning when you get killed.
Speaking of graphics we cannot but spend a few words on how this one Unreal Engine is die Hard and still manages to give so many emotions with breathtaking views, not to mention that Rare has given us an environment in which light is the master and gives moments of great ecstasy to all players.
It must also be said that every game is different from the others and that the islands are moved, slightly modified and randomly scattered in the ocean every time we start a new game. In reality what remains fixed is only our character and the ridiculously funny clothing we sew on him.
Now that we have praised this game but we come to the painful notes, bugs, defects, things - in short - that made us turn up our noses. Ok, we were joking: nothing to report except some small problem lag and matchmaking that could catapult you (if you don't have a group) into the crew of another group of friends who don't want you. In that case, they could kindly ask you to leave (thus making you redo the whole matchmaking process) or even lock you in the cell below deck, to have fun.
What have we talked about so far? Simply a game that achieves what it promised without launching into who knows what great ups and downs, a game that amuses you from the first to the last second of the game. A video game you will never want to quit or leave. Now it will be up to the developers to enrich it with ever new content without losing the spirit and initial momentum.
► Sea of Thieves is an Adventure type game developed by Rare and published by Microsoft for PC and Xbox One, the video game was released on 20/03/2018
