Pirates

Tries too hard

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

Pirates is a worms-styled adventure game, where you customize teams of pirates and battle for gold, hoping to unlock new levels, weapons, and costumes. Unfortunately Pirates tries too hard to include every detail of a battle game, while skipping right over the fun parts.

From the get-go, the interface is pretty clunky and confusing. There’s a little bar at the bottom that floats up to give you status messages, but half the time it gets in the way of what you’re trying to actually look at. The instructions area is comprehensive but broken. The game already walks you through most of what you need to know, no need to cover it again in the instructions. And when you go to back out of the current page you’re on, you’ll get taken to another instruction page instead. The navigational elements never quite stay in the same place as you move around, which has always been a peeve of mine. Searching for the exit button isn’t exciting. Also, for some reason, there’s no option to exit once you start a match.

When you start a game, there’s several things to customize- the teams playing, the level, the time limit, and the starting health. You can also create an entire custom team of your own to use (or just stick with a default). Confirm your settings, and start the match. This is where things get disappointing. The default levels are usually just a flat colored plane that the characters stand on, with virtually no background or terrain differences. The characters appear large so it feels like the game is always zoomed in. If a player gets blown away you might have to spend half your turn time searching for him. Even though there are different weapons there’s not much variation in the gameplay- walk up to an enemy, fire, end. Wait for them to do the same, and repeat. For some reason it’s impossible to damage your own teammates so never fear of using anything with splash damage. The game does throw in some semi-creative weapons (like spoiled rations and davy jones locker), but it wasn’t really enough to excite me.

Pirates also has its share of glitches. I’ve seen worse but they can still ruin a game in-progress. Usually one out of every four computer turns results in them aiming at the sky until the time limit has been reached. Blowing the last pirate into the water can cause the game to freeze up. Pirates tends to assume we know things sometimes when we might not. For example- if you want to surrender you have to click the surrender button in the weapons menu and then press the space bar to ‘activate’ it. Same with switching players.

The sole thing that is going to keep your interest in this game is the unlock system, and that’s pushing it. You win gold from matches regardless if you actually win the fight or not. You can use gold to unlock many new body parts to customize your team- not exactly my favorite when the graphics are a little sloppy to begin with. Admittedly the unlockable levels are much more interesting than the regular levels. And the new weapons add some variety. However the fact still remains that the battle system just isn’t very fun. This game is worth a look for the effort involved, but not much more.

Click here to play Pirates






Comments (6) [view all]

  Latest comment left by EvanStone:

Point taken... I guess it was kinda hard to start if off. I guess it just appealed to me because I love pirates... But totally Shawn, you have much better features. And the background images are pretty sweet, I have to admit.

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