Sea Of Thieves is an online adventure game where you play a crew of pirates roaming around a great sea, looking for treasures to plunder, skeletons to defeat and other ships to sink. It entirely lives on the fact that you can play it online with your friend, and ultimately dies because of the lack of content, lack of progression, frustrating player encounters and the fact that your millage may vary with your friends depending on what kind of gamers they are. I still had a good time with it, but it’s entirely because it’s something I could play with my buddies during these quarantine times.
I wrote a huge review and Chrome crashed as I hit save?! Thanks chrome.
Because of plenty of reasons, TCTD isn't a game I've enjoyed, don't buy it. These reasons include a boring story, boring gameplay, convoluted systems, too few interesting side activities, a huge world for no reason, forced multiplayer and forced online. That'll teach me not to save more often.
What do you get if you mix Batman, Assassin's Creed and Lord of the Rings? You get ME:SoM. It is incredibly reductive to call it only a by-product of these three things, but since one of the first thing you do is eagle-dive down a tower and then activate your bat/ghost vision to see the bad guys and then you are fighting the uruks from the mind of J.R.R. Tolkien, it's hard not to compare ME:SoM to the sum of its parts. That being said, there are a few very interesting systems in there, notably the nemesis system.
State of Decay is a vast and complex game full of systems and things to do. I feel like the game is too open and maybe a bit too complex, leaving you with a short list of actions you can take and a ton of systems to observe and care about as some kind of real-time clock decays the world around you - I think?
Saints Row IV is a delight, while I find that on one hand, it pulls too much from its predecessor, it goes in new, crazy directions both on the story and gameplay side. Some of its systems are so amazing and useful that they make others feel obsolete and perhaps, unnecessary. The end result is still fun and refreshing and pulled me to try and get every single thing complete between the story missions.
There is a great balance act when you're building an open world game; You need to have a main storyline compelling enough to have the player want to go forward with it and at the same time you need to have enough side activities to justify having the game being open world. A big open world without stuff to do in it only feels like a reason to run around (or drive) only to get to the next story beat. Sleeping Dogs succeeds at being a fun open world game with a few weird mechanics here and there but mostly interesting stuff to show.