PROS: Combat is interesting with some strategic elements
CONS: Same grindy gameplay, same features as every other Asian RPG, weak graphics
Gameplay: 5
Graphics: 6
Performance: 7
Overall: 6
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We took some time to play Seas of Gold from R2Games, a free to play browser RPG where you are the captain of your own ship; the game has many similar qualities to hero/team building RPGs where players must build up their power by collecting gear, upgrading their ship, acquire skills and numerous other aspects.
Initial impressions aren’t the strongest, starting out you can choose from four characters; two males and two females of seemingly different factions, but there is zero information on the character select about whether they are different classes, or any lore, or… anything. So with little to go on we picked the prettiest female pirate/captain because, well, why not? Having checked out a different character they all appear to start in the same location and have the same opening quest chain; so we’re unsure of what the difference between them is.
Stepping into the game and the graphics are fairly basic, at least a good five years plus out of date from what we’ve come to expect, but passable and the general UI looks decent enough. The quests are the most basic you could expect; talk to an NPC and pick up a quest then go an build something, talk to another NPC or kill a certain enemy, there’s a glimmer of storyline that is revealed with the few lines of quest text but far from any detail.
The combat itself is a step up from what we expected, loading into an instanced battleground you are faced with a battleground broken up into a 8x5 grid that you can move your character around in turn based combat and fight the enemy. Starting out it was generally one on one, with some rather sketchy attacks from a huge Mud Turtle that was, for some reason, able to fire mortar rounds at us; later on we had to fight multiple opponents at the same time. Positioning becomes quite important as you can quite easily get boxed in by the enemy and have nowhere to run; similarly you also need to move around terrain obstacles. In general the objective is to just destroy the enemy team, but there are also mini-objectives such as capturing a point on the map or stopping the enemy from holding it for too long, which we thought was a nice addition.
Much of the game falls into the same grind we’ve seen in other RPGs; you need to collect materials to build up your ship and then equip its slots with various gear items (deck, figurehead, cannons, magazines, etc.) which first and foremost make your stronger, but also give you more options when in combat allowing you to increase the number of square you can move in a turn or how many squares you can attack with range. It appears to be an endless cycle of upgrading that, realistically, comes pretty quickly in the early game but then gets a little more grindy later on. You can pick up new skills by finding Skill Books, which will give you more powerful attacks in combat, generally allowing you to nearly one shot an enemy. The exception being enemies that are higher level than you; at level 13 we tried to fight some level 20 enemies in the zone and we were killed almost immediately, so it gives you a good idea of the difference of power between levels.
Recruiting new Captains in the Tavern allows you to build up your fleet, you become responsible for providing them with new ships, upgrading their gear, much like your own character. You can summon your Fleet captains when in battle, evening things up when you are facing multiple opponents, however they act completely independently and so knowing how they would fight and what types of actions they are likely to take is important so that you can try to build your own strategy around it. Personally we would have preferred a more hands approach with controlling your Fleet and just having more characters to control in a battle.
The UI is a clutter of flashing icons prompting you to spend diamonds and recharge (ie. spending cash) for adding perks and bonuses, the “Events” are pretty uninspiring, revolving more around claiming items, logging in daily or spinning wheels, there’s not much in the way of fun content, just another means to make yourself stronger.
PVP in the “Arena” is extremely disappointing insofar that it is essentially the same as any other fight; whilst you may be fighting against a player’s team you’re not in fact fighting against that player and their character and fleet are controlled by the AI. We’re not really sure why they do this, plenty of games have an MMR system where you gain rank through wins and losses, so there’s no need to be able to fight a player who is offline. No actual Arena PVP means you’re going against automated AI and can’t try to out play or out smart your opponent in the same way you can going against a player.
From the few hours we played we’ll say that with a little more involvement from players then it would be half as bad a game, the RPG aspect falls really short and the same “The <name of enemy> is a threat to the bay, go and kill it!” from the same NPCs over and over gets really tedious. An absolutely eye-roll worthy element of the game is the end game ships; in this golden age of sail where pirates and fantasy creatures dominate the oceans, so too do we see huge steel battleships and more futuristic sea vessel that looks like the sub from the TV show Stingray. It seems the RPG element and immersion in the world was just cast aside in favour of having cool vehicles; so with such little regard given to the story element, so too do we feel compelled to disregard it as equally.
The game suffers from the same grind that most Asian developed RPGs do, we see the same features and mechanics over and over, and honestly we’re tired of it. Whilst the combat was a more favourable element, outside of that the game offers nothing new and less than most.
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