Pirates of Black Cove Review

Pirates of Black Cove is a bit of a departure for developers Nitro Games(they've done an arcadey casual game prior to this once), who are mostly known for making naval trading & battles in a strategy game. PoBC is a mish mash of a game, taking features from a few different genres trying to make a unique spin off of a naval game. Firstly, it wouldn't come as any surprise.... you play as a pirate.


You start off selecting your avatar from 3 different characters. You have the usual ranged pirate who's good at shooting things from a distance, brutish pirate that's good at melee but a bit slow and the faster female pirate who's faster but a lot more fragile. Not exactly a huge variety but hardly a concern since the game offers a lot more in other departments.

Piracy On The Caribbean
First off, the game sends you off to this wacky and humourous quest which is refreshing compared to the other more serious action RPG games. The humour however, can fall a little flat sometimes as I feel there's something that is lost in translation(or maybe it's just the sense of humour of the Finnish developers that isn't quite the same). You start off initiating contact with a group of pirates called... pirates. You'll have to work for them quite a bit before you're off to progress the story further. The story is a little kooky... to say the least.

The thing about Pirates of The Black Cove is that... it's an odd game... a really really odd game. It's a mish mash of gameplay mechanics from many different genres. You get initiated to the sailing mechanic which is quite arcadey(it's not going for a serious vibe if you haven't got the message yet). Your ship doesn't take damage from accidentally hitting other ships or the coast(which will happen a lot). Using WASD, you control the movement of your ship and braking(ships can't brake but furl their sails). One thing that was a little jarring was the use of left clicking your mouse to fire your cannons, which took a little getting used to. Space bar is used to fire off your special ability(which you can purchase and equip in towns).

That's one fast ship, forget about chasing it with your beginner ship. Doesn't matter if it's lugging a giant white whale. AHAB!!!!

You can pretty much start firing upon any ship you see, but be warned that picking a fight with a ship of a particular nation would make them more hostile towards you(doesn't affect any narrative other than just being attacked more on this open sea over world map). It makes sense, people don't like being attacked and will tell their pals.


Pirate Haven
Once you've landed on the pirate base, you'll collect quests, sell stuff, craft potions, buy new upgrades and special abilities for your ships(even buy new ships at the shipyard). All things which you'd do in an MMORPG(or RPG) except that this isn't exactly an RPG, there is no leveling up. The really weird thing is that to buy ships you'll need to collect blueprints(on top of paying out cash for it). You collect blueprints around the sea by stumbling upon them(they are placed all over the place... an artificial progression limit). Once you've collected a set number of blue print you can then 'unlock' a ship design and only then spend cash to buy them.

Your pirate town has a few nodes in which you can build only one building(you can't build a different type of building on one construction site). So it ain't really like the base building in an RTS nor do you have much choice due to the fact the different buildings have different costs, limiting you to the building you have money for(it's an artificial mechanic to control the pacing of the game... it's just too artificial... I mean other games do this but it's a tad bit too obvious in Pirates).



RTS
And then there's the RTS portion where the developers thought by adding another part to the game, you would have an awesome game. The thing is, it's not an extraordinary RTS experience but rather mediocre. You have about two or three slots to hold squads of different pirate squads and you go to your pirate town to get new squad types and replenish them. Whenever a quest requires you to attack an island, PoBC goes into this RTS segment that moves like a ten tonne truck. Yeah... everything runs rather sluggishly... this certainly ain't no StarCraft.

There nothing quite noteworthy about the RTS elements in PoBC leading me to question their design decision to include this as part of the gameplay. It serves as a temporary distraction to the average ship combat/adventuring. It's as if the devs went " Oh you know what would be cool? We have this engine and I know we can do an RTS bit"... no... just no...



Bug Ridden
At launch, the game wasn't exactly the most polished thing ever made. Graphical glitches, bad AI ship path finding(I saw ship crashing into the coasts all the time, this has been somewhat reduced with the latest patch though), bad path finding during the RTS portions are just a few of the issues in the game. There's also that ship buzzing issue with ships getting stuck in ports, and other objects and some ships mysteriously buzzing about like a bee.

There's been a few patches out now but they haven't completely solved all the issues. Path finding is still a little wonky. It's still a working game but animations are a little rough(except for the fact that some quests can crash your game... which I hear they've fixed). It's rather unfortunate(and this is putting it lightly) that Nitro Games released another game marred with bugs and instability, not an improvement from their previous entry.



"Pirates of Black Cove is like that first date you had where your date was completely uninteresting but was trying his/her darndest to impress you to the point of being annoying"



Conclusion
I was hopeful that with Pirates of Black Cove, Nitro Games would get a game with basic mechanics right... I was wrong. It's mediocre in every department. Each facet of the game has no depth and every single aspect of the games basic mechanic doesn't stand out and is riddled with bugs. Pirates of Black Cove is like that first date you had where your date was completely uninteresting but was trying his/her darndest to impress you to the point of being annoying to you. Yeah... that's Pirates of the Black Cove

Genre	RPG/Naval Action
Similar games	Sid Meier's Pirates
DRM	Steam/ None Depending On Download Service
Price	USD$19.99
Best Moment	Wacky humour & uninstalling the game

Pros:

• It's cheap
• It's working(to a certain extent)
• Your ship has some pretty neat special abilities/weapons

Cons:

• Runs like an old Mini Cooper even with rather low tech graphics.
• Bugs, bugs, bugs
• All gameplay mechanic are shallow and lack depth. Nothing makes this game interesting
• Mediocre RTS portion
• Building ships require the collection of blue prints which you collect from a designated spot in the world map... this doesn't change.

Verdict: You Might Want To Relegate This One Into Davy Jones Locker