Recent reviews by Bulgar Peasant

This has been my favorite game to play since I have bought it.
+ Beautiful graphics
+ Ship on ship combat is some of the most fun I have ever had with any PvP system
+ All progression in this game is purely cosmetic, meaning that you will never lose to someone because they had better cannons/guns/ships to you. You will have access to the exact same tool set throughout the entire game, and all improvement is based upon more effective use of that tool set. This, coupled with a very high skill ceiling (and even lower skill floor) give the player a strong sense that they earned any successes they have, rather than having just grinded them out.
+ The community of this game is endlessly enjoyable, even when they aren't friendly. You will really feel like you are in a hostile world of seafaring thieves and murderers in this game. Bigger ships will brutally attack smaller ships, other crews will spring traps on you, and trust is generally unwise. This may not be enjoyable to all players, but me and my crew find it very enjoyable to navigate dealing with dangerous potential threats around every turn.
+ Always something to be done, whether its maintaining/captaining the ship, fishing, searching a wreck, engaging in PvP, or countless other tasks. Plenty of ways to fill up the time between destinations.
- The core goal of the game is to become a pirate legend. This is an arduous task which I had a great deal of fun achieving, but ultimately didn't change my game-play in any meaningful way. All it did was give me access to new cosmetics that I will never use, and Athena's Fortune missions, which are quite underwhelming.
- Very repetitive missions. After around 10-20 hours, you will likely have experienced almost everything the game has to offer you. If you want to enjoy this game, you need to be able to find it outside of the grind for more loot (try out PvP, role playing, or some weird new tactics to alleviate this.)
- If you are playing this game alone, it is VERY difficult to enjoy. Everything is so much SLOWER when played this way. Additionally, other players, and several PvE threats will absolutely curbstomp you unless you are exceptionally competent at this game

Some advice to new players:
* Play with a crew. If you don't have friends to play with, head on over to the discord, they are always happy to help set up new players with a crew to learn the ropes with, and are a very friendly community.
* This is a game called Sea OF THIEVES. People want to kill you and take your loot for fun, never forget that! See a ship heading your way? It is probably trying to kill you. Heading towards a ship? It probably things you are trying to kill it. Be very cautious around other players, and expect them to be paranoid of you.
* Don't grind for anything, especially pirate legend. All of the rewards in this game are purely cosmetic, and none of it is satisfying to grind for. Just play the game, naturally going for whatever tasks you seek to accomplish, and you will have a much more enjoyable experience (and almost definitely save up enough for whatever it is you might want).
* Stick with the PvP, it gets better. On account of the high skill ceiling, PvP is oftentimes very frustrating for newer players. If you just keep trying, and maybe try to find an experienced crew, you WILL get better, and you will feel great about it. PvP is the most satisfying part of this game, at least for me, and I was only able to get to that point by sticking through the occasionally frustrating fight.

Let me start out by saying that I absolutely love this game when it works. The combat can be tense, quick, and fun; and with strong strategy aspects to boot. But ubisoft's servers for this game are complete and utter trash. I had to do some manual port forwarding with this game to be able to connect to games (never happened to me before by the way). Around half of all games give you no xp or renown, essentially cutting your progression in half. Some games also have incredible lag, making the game near unplayable. Joining into matchmaking can sometimes take forever, forcing you to alt-f4 out. In the current state of this game, I cannot recommend it to anyone. When Ubisoft fixes their game, I will change my recommendation.

Very good game, but if you are able to stay in power for a few terms, the game enters some form of utopia state, where is becomes very difficult to lose.

When buying this game, clear out the next month of your schedule, because I assure you, this game is far more important then any social interaction you could be doing instead.