The ancient Storm Trident has been broken into six fragments and spread all over the southern oceans of Hoctal–guess who's tasked with finding them–go on, guess!
An evil pirate, Captain Cornelia is also looking for the fragments, and her skeleton warriors arrrr your constant enemy. A "Roguelite", Trident's Tale will rob you of a lot of progress if you go off-mission and don't save regularly.
Ocean (that's you) deserts her pirate mentor Laertes and leaves him to a fiery, skeleton pirate death... Will he survive, if he did, can you save him? Do you want to?
Ocean is quite an agile, controllable character and the combat is easy & pleasing, but she won't even jump and grab most ledges or even a ladder, so she's no Larrra Croft.
Laertes gives you his special Divinorum pistol that stuns enemies to give you a decent chance when multiples attack. This becomes a vital weakening/stunning tactic as the game has a persistent dodgy collision detection with enemies hitting you when you've clearly dodged their attack, and an ineffective lock-on targeting system that seems to hinder more than help.
A character named Aleq appears during your first serious fight and endows you with a new power–Anathema, which stuns and applies "curse" to enemies for several seconds so you can beat the living daylights out of them. Subsequent crew members are recruited and each gives you new skills to help your magical pirateyness.
A simple sailing mechanic of unfurling 3 levels of sail with presses of 'Y', and slowing down by pressing 'B' is similar to Assassin's Creed Black Flag–if Disney remade it. It has all the typical pirate game tropes, and adds robots, golems, potions, spells and American accents...
There are thousands of pickups to find (sellable and/or crafting materials), as well as crates and barrels to smash, which contain small amounts of $.
As I alluded to earlier, sea battles use a similar mechanic to good old Assassin's Creed Black Flag, but manage to make it even more cack-handed and tricky–hitting a megalodon in the mush is no mean feat, I can tell ya!
Now to some of the disappointing points. Ocean can swim, but never far from shore. If you do stray she'll drown, and sometimes the "Deep Waters" warning doesn't disappear as it should, which is annoying. We encountered a few glitched NPCs and visually the game looks old, it reminds me of 25 year-old Jak & Daxter in places, and has a weird, fuzzy overlay on it (like someone smeared your TV with something–I actually thought my TV screen needed cleaning at first!) This is more apparent at some times than others. Initially I thought this was to simulate mist and make the game look more atmospheric, but it appears when the sun is out, so who knows? Maybe it's to mask the performance issues, which were the bane of the Nintendo Switch version and inexplicably remain apparent on the Xbox Series X. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a game with visuals such as this to run at 60fps, but it stutters and starts here, there and everywhere.
The game has a piratey-style map, which has been made to be as difficult to use as possible, like someone who's never used a game controller designed it. On the good side, you can drop points of interest and mission objectives so they're easier to find when sailing. Once you've discovered a new island you can fast travel to and from there (from parrot to parrot for some reason), making the best part of the game (the sailing & ship-to-ship combat) semi-redundant, but it is a real boon if a quest requires you to sail from one end of the world to the other.
Many of the game's RPG-style elements seem redundant, is there really, really anyone out there who's going to change their sword, pistol, cannons or clothes depending on which enemy they're fighting?
At the start, Trident's Tale is hard. Inexplicably the hand-to-hand combat becomes much harder than the sea battles, mainly due to the suspect collision detection and a sluggish health potion swigging mechanic.
After a while I started to wonder if the developers had ever actually played a RPG before, as the there's no way of comparing the stats of an item you may want to craft against the item you have equipped without backing out of the crafting menu to the pause menu and selecting the equipped item's menu–which could be 6 or 7 sluggish shoulder button presses–Simply awful UI design.
I think Trident's Tale could have been a little charmer if it had more work, more imagination and more variation. The game never changes from the start; get a quest, go somewhere, fight skeletons, fight sub-boss, return item, wash/rinse/repeat until you get to the multi-level final boss–defeat him and you can't play on to finish up other quests/collectables, so beware. To cap it all, the game still has unresolved (broken) achievements/trophies which always leaves a sour taste in the mouth of any gamer worth his sea salt.
But... currently selling on the Xbox Store for a mere £8.37 (previously £16.74) it's hard not to recommend this piratey adventure–while keeping my fingers crossed that they patch its numerous issues.
Many thanks to 3D Clouds and PressEngine.