Have you ever bought an early access game, and seeing at it later you note that it hasn't changed since years ago, abandoned, a game you bought because you really thought it had the potential. Pixel Piracy was that to me, a rogue-like pirate themed sandbox would have been the perfect game to pass hours upon hours on, but this game is the definition of a broken game, it did not fulfill his potential. Yet I was biassed in this situation so looking back on it, as it has and ending and can be considered finished, with an unbiased and objective view to it. Is it worth your time or not?
Pixel Piracy is a game made by Vitali Kirpu, indie developer that was produced by Alexander Poysky. Drama between the two will eventually lead to bankruptcy of the company and abandonment of the game. The game did eventually release a enhanced version along with apologies but that was the last instance we heard the team, until a couple months ago when Vitali Kirpu revealed details about the problem between him and his producer on a long reddit post, which I won't go in detail about, but he specified that he cannot work on Pixel Piracy because it brings bad memories and it is understandable.
But we are not here to rate the history but the game, Pixel Piracy enhanced soon became the base version, and here we go to an adventure among the wide oceans to battle fearless pirates in slow-paced battles, with cringy sounds and pirate music in the background. Shall we begin?
The Story (mild spoilers)
The story is kind of there I guess. You are a pirate and you have to do pirate stuff, if there could be bugs in the story there would have been but lucky there can't be any. Basically there are some bosses you need to defeat and that's all of the story, classic story of the 90's NES games, right?
The Gameplay
This game is a mixture of rogue-like, strategy, sandbox and rpg elements, a side-scrolling adventure where you click on things to wait for your character to get there and do the action to click on the next thing, repeat, adding only a very limited crafting system and building. The character leveling system is okay, but it does not save the game from being plain boring all the time. Basically your goal being defeating the bosses you explore islands, which is a good premise, imagine having islands with different biomes, animals, events. Instead you have two types of islands, a town island and dangerous island with random encounters, the only other thing that can happen is that you fight in the wide ocean with other pirates, yer, it's boring and slow. And taking all of this boring premise and adding the painful and numerous bugs we get this game destroyed, especially in the endgame, this is so broken. And not just bugs, crashes, lag, controls not working... And it got released on consoles too, and those versions make no difference.
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Nice