Imagine you’re back as a child, flipping the kitchen table, tying a broom and a sheet to one of the corners, and shouting “All aboard!” while holding a sword-shaped balloon. That’s the feeling you’ll get playing the latest procedural role-playing game set in a pirate world on the video game scene, King of Seas. The development team is Team17 from 3DClouds, an Italian studio that has produced very interesting projects over the past three years.
The engine used is Unreal Engine, and the game is available on almost all platforms for €24.99
I can immediately tell you that it will certainly captivate all fans of pirate settings, with its strengths and weaknesses, it will pull you into an engaging gaming experience that’s not entirely predictable.
The graphics and the variety of ship customisations are the highlight of this title, which truly aims to entertain and spark that pirate adventure urge characteristic of our childhood games. 
The game for those who didn't understand it is a sigle player and features 5 difficulty levels: Mozzo, Cannoniere, Capitano, Corsaro, King of Seas
My experience consists of 20 hours of gameplay at Captain level; tested on PC with graphics set to maximum, installed on SSD in a machine i7 7700 with graphics card Geforce GTX 1070 and presented no technical, graphical, or optimisation issues.
The plot is simple but engaging. Avoiding spoilers, I tell you that the objective is to solve a conspiracy that will concern you and will serve as the central thread for all the main quests that will advance the story.
The absence of a proper tutorial will make things much more immersive, as you will have to discover the various game mechanics on your own.
If you're new to the game, I recommend starting at a level lower than Captain. The development team has thoughtfully made the challenge demanding, and even from the intermediate level I chose to test the title, I can’t hide the fact that I struggled significantly to progress through the story, and after 20 hours I’m still far from finishing.
It all boils down to an Action RPG with loot mechanics that, while primarily focused on accumulating loot, offer a wide range of experiences to try. Between primary and secondary missions, you’ll accumulate money to buy ships increasingly suited to your needs; you can try the levelling in fishing, the map exploration and the conquest of new port areas, without missing out on the gunfire battles at sea. Everything takes place under the command of a ship, meaning you won’t have a character to customize — you’ll choose your gender at the start of the game, but from then on, your character will only appear in dialogue as a comic strip. What you can customize are your ships. These customizations will make your vessel — whether a sloop or galleon — more effective; you can choose from a wide range of sails, hulls, castles, sails, cannons, projectiles, as well as different types of crew and the presence of specialized pirates who will grant you useful skills and buffs in combat and navigation. All of this can be dropped or rewarded through various quests, or obtained by winning a battle, or simply by collecting treasures found at sea.
Fleets are divided into three macro-groups: Pirates, Military Navy and Merchant Navy, and the gameplay experience will be further enriched by the presence of magic, ghost ships and kraken.
Beware, however, as every time you lose a battle, your ship — along with all its customizations — will be taken away, so carefully consider your moves each time; sometimes, fleeing might prove the wiser choice. Compared to other titles of the same genre, battles seem more challenging, and depending on the ship you possess and the enemy you face, you’ll need to alternate frontal attacks with the various skills at your disposal, trying to make use of all the resources the sea provides — including explosive barrels, active volcanoes and sea caves.
The game is, in short, well-structured, truly rich in possibilities and content, and therefore worthy of becoming one of the most captivating titles in the pirate scene.
As for the negative aspects, they are purely experiential. The side quests are too repetitive; whenever you lose your ship due to a misjudgment in a fight, you’ll have to restart the side quest chain that will allow you to earn money to buy back the type of ship you lost.
My 20-hour gaming experience, as mentioned, wasn’t enough, and I’m sure I’ll want to continue playing this title over time. I firmly believe that if the development team, in the future, manages to enrich the quest sections and reduce the game’s overly repetitive elements, King of Seas could become one of the genre’s elite titles.
Personally, I believe that, given its structure, beyond the story, it has the foundation to become a multiplayer, which would add a fundamental element to King of Seas that perhaps tends to be missing — competitiveness — but this will probably remain nothing more than a faint hope, given the initial concept and the single-player focus established by the development team.
In general, I feel strongly that I recommend the game to all fans of the genre and pirate settings, while to everyone else, given the non-trivial cost for a single-player indie title, I suggest taking advantage of the vast resource that is the web to assess whether this game might suit you before proceeding with the purchase.
