It’s no secret that I like pirates. I might not know how to sail a ship in real life, and I didn’t even enjoy those second two movies about certain pirates that hang out in the Caribbean, but the high sees make for an interesting setting for fantasy media.

At PAX, I came across the booth for Dust Devil Studios and their new tower defense game, Zombie Pirates. I talked a little with some of the guys that worked on the game and was originally going to write up my hands-on impressions. Long story short, I was given the hook up so I could give it a full review instead.

If you come to me and say “try this tower defense game”, my immediate reaction is “why should I?” I know that is a horribly unfair way to approach any game, and it’s one I really try to avoid. The problem is that we were inundated with free flash tower defense games for several years, and the genre never seemed like very much fun to me. Then along came PopCap with their excellent Plants vs Zombies, a game I know Zombie Pirates will have a tough time avoiding comparisons to.

If you are unfamiliar with the tower defense genre, you build various types of “towers” that try to stop a flow of enemies from either destroying your base or getting to a certain space on the screen. In the case of Zombies Pirates, you take on the roll of Smiling Jack O’Hurlihan, Captain of the Sunrunner. Using parrots as currency to call in more ships (the “towers” of the Zombie Pirates universe), it is up to you and your fleet to keep the zombie pirates from reaching the left side of the screen. If the zombies make their way across the map or the Sunrunner is sunk, it’s game over.

So what sets Zombie Pirates apart?

One of the things I was never enamored with in the average tower defense games is their passive nature. You set up your turrets/cannons/dudes and then have to sit back and watch things unfold. This is not the case in Zombie Pirates. Since you are dealing with pirate ships, your fleet is mobile. If your front line is getting hammered and needs to heal, just click them and move them to the back.

When you destroy enemy ships, treasure chests are dropped into the ocean. Clicking on those will either give you more parrots to bring in more ships from your fleet, grog used to heal your ships, or huge barrels that can be used to cause massive devastation to the enemy fleet.

As you progress, new ships with different fighting styles are unlocked. You will eventually face birds that can only be defeated with your flying gyrocopters and sharks that need submarines to be dealt with. This forces you to think about where you are placing your ships and what you are spending your resources on. It adds a much needed RTS (real time strategy) element to the gameplay that keeps things much more fast-paced and interesting.

In addition to the regular ships you can call in, various other name characters will join up with your crew. Each of their ships has its own special abilities which really helps add to the variety of your fleet. You will also collect money which can be used to upgrade the Sunrunner and most of the other ship types between levels.

As the screenshots show, Zombie Pirates keeps things on the cartoony side. The characters are way over-the-top, making it one that even a younger crowd should be able to get into. My only small complaint along these lines is that the named characters all have little catchphrases they say which start to get pretty repetitive after extended play.

Along with the main story missions, Zombie Pirates has a lot of side content. Each section includes its own challenge level unlocked by completing the story missions for that area. There are crazy dream sequence levels that require you to fight off Jack’s subconscious, and a rum runner mini-game that allows you to grind for cash if you are trying to unlock more upgrades.

With the added mobility of your “towers” being pirate ships, Zombie Pirates seems pretty easy when you first get into it. I blasted through the first third of the game with little resistance. Then I realized something; with everything going on in a level, as soon as I stopped giving the game my full attention, it started kicking my butt. It may fall into the category of a “casual” game, but things really start ramping up a few worlds in. Plague ships, ghost ships, and giant monsters are just a few of the added menaces. Then, just when you get used to those, the enemies show up with rockets that can traverse the entire map and blow up in a large and devastating area of effect, which can quickly decimate your fleet.

Once I got to these increased challenges, Zombie Pirates really had its hooks into me. It never got so hard that I found myself getting completely stuck and frustrated on a level, but I did find that rethinking my strategy was key to progression in the later levels.

Zombie Pirates is a lot of fun. You can pick it up and play through a single level in a few minutes, or you can get addicted to it like I did and blast through the levels relatively quickly. If you are looking for a hardcore strategy game, it might not be for you. But if you are looking for something more casual that will still give you your strategy fix, then you’ll probably enjoy Zombie Pirates.

This review is based on a download of the retail version of Zombie Pirates provided by Dust Devil Studios.

Tags: Dust Devil Studios, PAX, PAX '10, PAX 2010 COVERAGE, tower defense, Zombie Pirates

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 30th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Indie Games, 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.