It seems I have reviewed quite a few pirate themed games during my time here on WingDamage, from ones that fought zombies to ones on monkey related islands. They are a recurring gaming mascot that lends itself well to interesting and colorful character designs.

In Paradox Interactive and Nitro Games’ Pirates of Black Cove, there is certainly not a shortage of wackiness or crazy characters. There is a level of cartoonishness in the writing that lets you know right out of the gate that they were there to have a good time with this RTS/RPG/Navel Combat hybrid (or as the game’s site calls it, “Light Strategy Adventure”).

You start by picking one of three pirate captains, each with their own special talents. I decided to go with the rifle toting guy, mostly because he was the one with the sweet eye patch. You soon find that, while you are captain of your own ship, there are much more important pirates that you will be answering to. As you progress, various pirate leaders will give you quests, the completion of which will gain you monetary rewards, as well as a measure of favor with that faction. Once you have maxed that out, you can get the pirate leader of that faction to join you in your fight as another hero character.

Pirates of Black Cove is broken up into two main parts. They make logical sense from the piratical point of view, as there are the parts where you are traveling/fighting on your ship and the sections where you are on land completing quests and plunderin’.

On land, the game takes on the flavor of an RTS with some light RPG elements for your hero character. You have three slots for units, which can be filled by hiring scallywags and various other undesirables to fight alongside you. Rather than each character taking up a slot each, different unit types allow for a group of that type. So your basic melee units may allow for up to five of them before a slot is full, while the huge cannon toting guy that does massive splash damage takes up a whole slot on his own.

The nice thing is, as you get more hero units on your side by gaining their loyalty, they too will have three slots that can be filled up. The downside is the slow walking speed. While you are progressing through a town and its surrounding landscape you don’t notice it too much, but once an area is cleared of enemy units and you have to walk all the way back to your ship, it is excruciating. There is a button on-screen that will call all your units back to the ship, but all of them have to be back at the dock before you can actually depart. There were a few times where, for the stories sake, I could see not having a quick “back to ship instantly” button, but that shouldn’t have excluded it from the game as a whole.

Missions aren’t the only time the slow walking speed is a problem. When you are navigating a pirate base, you have to physically walk your main character to the building to recruit units. This takes way longer than is necessary and seems like the kind of thing that could have been streamlined into some sort of menu system.

Unfortunately, the slowness doesn’t end there.

While I found the actual ship to ship combat to be pretty entertaining, the travel time between anything happening on the wide blue ocean became boring pretty fast. There are a lot of collectibles around the game world, but the slow travel speed made me never want to veer off course.

Newer ships with better stats can be acquired, but the cost seemed disproportionately high. More ships available for purchase with smaller incremental stat increases for cheaper prices might have helped alleviate this issue. As it played out for me, I was spending so much money on units that I was stuck in the starter ship up until a boss fight where I absolutely could not win without upgrading my ship.

I gave in and started grinding for money. This entailed attacking random ships and collecting money for destroying them. This didn’t get me much money each time, so it was pretty slow going. I decided to try capturing ships, which I had written off earlier because every time I had tried in the past the ship was either way worse than the starting ship, or would immediately kill me if it was actually worth having.

After several tries, I finally acquired a much faster, more powerful ship and suddenly navigation of the world seemed much more manageable. If only it had been easier to get a better ship earlier in the game, I think I would have been a lot more into it as a whole.

While Pirates of Black Cove does have its charm, it unfortunately lost me with its slow pacing. There were no less than three patches while I was playing it for review, so perhaps they can address some of these issues down the road.

This review is based on the retail version of Pirates of Black Cove provided to the reviewer by Paradox Interactive.

Tags: Nitro Games, Paradox Interactive, PC, Pirates of Black Cove, RTS, strategy

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2011 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.