Sea of Thieves Review

Rare built the best pirate ship simulator anyone has made and forgot to put a game inside it. The sailing is the achievement, with real rigging, a wheel, a capstan and sails that must be angled to the wind, so crewing a galleon genuinely requires four people talking to each other rather than four people pressing buttons. The water is still a rendering benchmark, buoyant and legible enough that you can read an incoming storm from the swell alone.

Naval combat, with cannonballs punching hull breaches while someone bails below deck and another patches, produces stories nothing else generates. But the 2018 launch shipped three voyage types, all of them fetch quests, no progression that changed how you played, and skeletons as the only enemy worth naming. Twenty hours in, every session repeated itself exactly. A beautiful engine and a hollow shell, rescued much later by years of updates and a subscription audience that kept the crews full.