Pixel Piracy

Pixel Piracy is the only game I know of where the results of your time investment can just randomly be taken away from you, leaving you in a state where its almost impossible to progress with the game.

You take the role of the captain of a ship, build yourself a crew, buy them food and pay their wages to keep them happy, kit them out with the finest of weaponry... Oh and fight other pirates in navel warfare... Sounds cool right?

Except when you tell your crew to go board the enemy ship and, with their captain mercilessly slaughtering enemies in front of them and the expansive blue, shark infested sea behind them... They choose the latter.

And that's it, they're gone from the game.

Taking with them the initial hiring cost, however much food they've helped themselves to, items you've used on them to cultivate them into the perfect ship mate you've always wanted...

All because the game makes them walk left instead of right.

And this was a consistent issue, which meant I couldn't progress that far into the game because I was constantly spending all my gold replenishing my ranks.

I bought it cheap in a sale, so maybe I shouldn't complain too much. But as bad as other games I've played are, they at least haven't decided to just randomly remove the results of my labours because the AI can't work out what to do.

But there's a lot of other little issues that as a collective really just suck all the fun out of playing.

Quite often after issuing an order to a "group", some will decide that obeying their captain isn't in their best interests. Then I didn't mind them drowning so much.

When you select somewhere to go on the map, you're treated to a "traveling" transition... Where you just watch the ship sail while a percentage counter slowly increases. Sometimes your crew sing a shanty. I have no idea at all why this is in the game other than to pad it out.

Rewards from chests were usually around 10g... After returning to the ship I was blowing up the enemy ship for 100g. The rewards are just garbage.

From what I've seen of it the actual gameplay loop gets old pretty quick; go fight pirate ships, go explore tiny islands, go back to town for supplies, repeat. The game gives very little incentive (at least short term, as I've said I've not really been *able* to play long term) to actually play.

The menus are unpleasant to look at, I'm fine with the pixel art aesthetic, but the menus are just really unintuitive and take way longer to navigate than they need to. I couldn't even find my items for the longest time.

I have no idea how they managed it, but the framerate would regularly slow to a crawl in towns.

I like the idea, but I hate playing the game.

This is even playing the "enhanced" edition.