Being excited for the new pirate RPG King of Seas, I jumped on the chance to download the demo when it released today on Nintendo Switch and take if for a spin. What I found made me hopeful for the full release of the game, but also a bit concerned about several areas that feel incomplete - even for a demo.
First the good - King of Seas hour-long demo starts the player out with a brief story session to get the player accustomed to the way ships maneuver on the open seas. With a top-down view and no way to move the camera, getting the feel for how to steer your ship can be tricky, so the fact that the demo sent me on a little delivery run was very welcome. By the time I had delivered my goods, I felt pretty good about how to steer, speed up, slow down, and avoid ramming stuff.
The story feels fine, if a little light, told mostly by static drawings of the characters with accompanying word bubbles. Nothing revolutionary, but it works for a game in which we never see character models. You play as your ship, so why design 3D people just for cut scenes?
Unfortunately, there are a few parts of the demo that feel a bit off - all of which could be corrected by the time the full game releases. The player starts with an empty map (King of Seas is procedurally generated), which is supposed to fill in as the player moves about and finds new ports and islands. Unfortunately, my map remained empty for my entire two hours (I played the demo twice), making it difficult to understand where I was supposed to go next - or see where I had been.
I also had a problem with the third quest in the demo, which asks players to sink three merchant ships. No matter how long I wandered about, I could never locate any of the ships I was supposed to sink. This may be a way for the devs to get players to explore and wind down their time with the demo, but why put the quest in the demo at all if there is no way to solve it? I would have much rather had the game just say something like "Go forth and find your fortune!" and then just set me free to sail the seas while the timer counted down.
I encountered a few other glitches, including one late instance when the game completely froze while I was in the inventory menu (which is why I started over again). In the end, while I enjoyed spending a few hours putting around and getting into scraps with other ships (I particularly liked one run-in I had with a ghost ship), I am a bit concerned that lack of polish displayed in this demo might convince people not to buy King of Seas, rather than the other way around.
