Pirate Code

I figured this would be a quick and shallow casual pirate game, but it turned out to be much more in depth than I thought. This is a tactical pirate/naval warfare strategy game. Most of the time you'll be battling it out at sea or inside cities. The sea, unfortunately, is rather boring with islands spread all around but no land masses to sail around or interact with. The islands feel a little like planets in space. There are no currents or sea monsters (that I've encountered thusfar), so most of the time you'll be sailing from one island to the next, or hunting pirates to battle. Luckily, that's where the game shines. There are twenty ships spread over four factions. Each faction has their own attack patterns and special moves that you can level up. You can also place captains on ships to give them even more special moves. There is a limit to the amount of crew you can have, so you have to assemble your own ship formations to best suit your strategy. This keeps the battles interesting. Every enemy has a different fleet, and you have to work out a strategy every single fight. Which prevents it from becoming a grind. It gives great satisfaction to beat a stronger opponent with trickery and well thought out plans. The battles rarely last long, so it's also good for quick games. If you do tire from fighting, you can follow the story line, do side quests, gather items, go fishing or do some botany. Because why not. You can even fish or pick herbs during battles. Also, there are many special items that give perks or bonuses or one time boosts to further customize your fleet. And you can also purchase paints and patterns similar to Westwind. So far I'm finding the game very enjoyable as it is. Add to that a dev who's active in the community and constantly working on improvements and you can't really go wrong with this game.

In cooperation with Steam Group Turn Based Lovers: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/turn-based-lovers And published on the website: https://turnbasedlovers.com/pirate-code-review/ It’s an honor as a bearded Steam player to share my thoughts on playing Pirate Code last week. A game developed by one bearded developer from CIRCUIT HIVE. And what a missed opportunity it is. This developer didn’t ask around on Steam for some folks to test the game before release. If he did, those testers did a bad job. It’s not only a little rough around the edges, but it misses some basic functionality we, as PC players, demand from every game in the genre. Rant incoming --EDIT January 4, 2019-- All issues I described about pop up screens not being able to close by mouse, no autosave, and ship movement are all addressed by the developer and so there is reason to change this part of the review. No rant anymore ;-) Rant over At the same time, all of those issues didn’t prevent me from playing Pirate Code, having fun listening to the pirate yells, the original music tracks that absolutely fits the theme and enjoy watching and listening sinking enemy ships. Within the somewhat unpolished game lays a serious strategy game title that has a very rewarding game flow and an addictive one more turn feeling. You start the game as an old pirate and his daughter. But he calls himself a mercenary. And as a mercenary, you are asked by a small peaceful island to help them fight against pirate raiders. The main goal, of course, is to master the seas. The main story functions as a tutorial for new players. There is a lovely portrait showing the pirate and his daughter, but as soon you make contact with other pirates, your crew or key figures in the main and side missions, they all lack a portrait painting. In a game with lot’s of content in the form of graphical objects, this is really missing. All characters in game are plain text presented on huge text-boxes. The Worldmap The open sea is the world map. It’s divided into regions. You have to unlock regions by playing. Every region contains one or more islands. Those islands you can find by exploring. The player can buy maps in harbors on those islands to make it easier to find them and to be able to display a navigation arrow on the sea map which is very helpful. In harbors, you can buy and sell multiple items. This includes ships, ship upgrades, buffs, crew, luxury objects, supplies and items you can use to customize your ship like flag patterns and colors. It’s a good and complete mix of usable ingame objects and collector’s items. All categorically placed in your inventory. In shipyards you can save the game, you can accept missions for the main quest and there is a continues load of bounty (side) missions to accept with a maximum of four different missions at the same time. Those are diverse and can be requested for supplies, proof of sinking pirate ships or match your strength with one of the enemy captains. In Pirate Code, if you leave the port you are a simple sprite in the enormous open sea. The controls here are somewhat different and in real time. There isn’t much navigation required that really test your reflexes, but to pick the right fights, the ones that are most rewarding, but also possible to win, can be somewhat frustrating. Anyway, the game shines when you actually enter a battle. You will see a hexgrid varied in size with multiple enemy ships. Those encounters are randomly generated so it’s a surprise how though the battles will be. Glad you have the option to set one of your ships to fishing instead of fighting for some extra loot. But for most fights you really need your whole fleet, tactically decide their movement formation and skill use. Ships can move and shoot in one turn. The battle is turn-based. You can buff other ships, for example with combat yells, if they have the skill or have a captain aboard. There are many other skills to learn by books and scrolls you can find or buy. Not all skills are available for all ships and the number of ships you can buy is really diverse. All with different basic skills as well. Double movement, multiple cannons and so on. The tactical battles don’t take that much time. After every battle, you will be rewarded with experience, gold and liberty points, that also unlocks new options and maps in different places on the map. It’s a big game. It’s not really casual, but battles don’t last for hours. There is a lot of replay value since loot and enemy encounters are generated on the fly. Because the battles don’t take forever and the loot is rewarding you keep playing since one more battle is just ten minutes. And before you know you have hours of sinking enemy ships and listening to funny pirate yells. There are two mechanisms in Pirate Code I want to point out since they are not often used in other games in the genre, but probably offers what a lot of gamers want. There are no random dice rolls in the game. You know how much damage your ship, and if you know the status of them, the enemy ship will do. There are no missed dice rolls here or hidden algorithms. Of course, ships have buffs to improve damage dealing, but they are all visible at forehand. That offers a more tactical way of play and I’m actually fine with it. The other mechanism is that lost ships and crew are automatically repaired after fights, experience isn’t ship based so you keep all experience from a defeated ship in your fleet as well. And you keep all loot. Of course, you have a harder time to win the battle and when your whole fleet is defeated you will return to your last save point automatically. If you can look past an enormous UI with chocolate fonts and don’t care about fine tuning the game to your liking there is a deep game in it that combines turn-based tactical naval battles with a rarely seen, but oh so fun, Tropico 2 like pirate theme. Though it doesn’t end with wooden ships and cannons. In late game, you can even take command over a fully customized fleet of Steampunk like ships. You can play Pirate Code as a coffee break game by doing some bounty quests or dive into a multiple chapter story. Rough around the edges but made by someone with a passion for boardgames since his childhood. That is obvious. Thank you for reading my review about Pirate Code by Circuit Hive and let me know if you want to read more reviews from my hand in the future.

Pirate Code - пошаговая стратегия в мире пиратов. Формируйте свой флот и команду, грабьте корованы, проходите опасные миссии на поиск разыскиваемых пиратов и защищайте свои территории. Игра по сути своей масштабна. Игроку предоставляется огромный океан с множеством островов, которые можно захватить. Сами бои проходят в пошаговом режиме на воде. Очень много диалогов, имеются достижения в стиме, отсутствует русский язык, заводная пиратская музыка на фоне и неплохая графика. Короткий обзор получился? Ну, собственно, как и сам игровой контент, тоже короткий и незначительный. Приобретая игру, я надеялся увидеть открытый мир, кучу возможностей, даже всплыла в голове старая игра про пиратов "Корсары", но на самом деле всё оказалось иначе. Игра неплохая, и её даже можно купить особым любителям морей, но не за 435 рублей... Слишком жирно для такой игры. Рекомендую, но поставлю палец вниз, ибо лучше дождаться скидки как минимум 50%.

A fun turn-based combat system including procedural generation of the enemy fleet and random battle maps, fishing and gathering. The last two being done in exchange of a movement action of one of your boats during combat. The real time ocean navigation allows to hunt pirates and links islands/settlements together. There's a large number of ships and upgrades which allow for many different approaches but most of the content is gated by story chapters so expect a few hours of playing before being able to fully customize your fleet (earning blueprints to then order boats to buy). Each boat is able to unlock random perks as it levels up doing quests or hunting enemies and it's up to you to pick one per type: offense/defense/support. Captains also offer one more layer of customization since each of them grants a special bonus to the boat they lead and also allows said boat's crew to learn a skill known only by that captain. Overall a well polished and fun sailing time!

This is a hidden gem of a game, and it is all the more impressive considering the developer is mostly a one-man team from the looks of it! They appear to be pretty active which is also a plus. I have been on a pirate-kick lately and this game caught my attention because I also love Tactical Battles so thought I would give it a try. At first, I feared it might be too easy, but I know better than to judge a game on its tutorial and kept playing and got hooked. It is a rather addicting grind for gold and various other items to get more crew members and new pirate ships. Battles definitely get more complex as you move beyond the initial battles introducing the game. Eventually you will get outnumbered and outgunner and will have to plan your attacks carefully as well as watching your own movement. There have been times I have embassingly lost a battle where I outgunned and outnumbered the enemy. All because I failed to watch my placement and watched in horror as they managed to attack multiples of my ships with just one of theirs - yikes! An interesting thing I like is there is no RNG with the combat. There are no misses or varied damage. You know what you will get and can plan accordingly. This makes it more of a tactical puzzle game in a way rather than something like XCOM which is a welcome change from the usual tactical games I play. Graphics are decent; the portraits are charming though few, and the spritework and backgrounds are really nice, I love them. Music score is great for the seafaring and naval combat mood too. Game seems to be pretty long, I have not even scratched the surface yet and only unlocked the blueprints for the first ship of each faction. Looking forward to playing more and see what else this developer makes in the future.

After two and a half hours I don't believe that I will be completing this game any time soon and wanted some show-n-tell on the store page seeing as this has been around for several weeks now without even a 'Let's Play' video dedicated to it In short Pirates Code is a decent game but it's really reaching out to a very small niche crowd who have a lot of extra time on their hands to dedicate to one game Most of PC's gameplay revolves around getting into fights with pirate fleets coasting around the many small ports in the game's world. Grind some battles, go to port and sell loot, buy new ship, buy new crew member and then rinse repeat as your fleet and special abilities grow stronger Encounters, however, can be frustratingly random with enemies coasting in quickly from off screen and catching you just after you've fought three five minute battles and were a second away from saving at port again. There is a 'Flee' option but it costs gold (or pendandts) to use and if you don't have enough you can say a sweet goodbye to your last fifteen minutes of precious game time. The enemy fleets have color-coded rings around them depicting how large they are but the colors can sometimes be deceiving ending in death after a long battle and the final shot fired by the enemy before you could fire yours; those one-shot-from-a-victory battles feel numerically perfect and it would've been nice to have an auto-battle system, like Might & Magic Heroes', calculating resutls prior to engagement along with a less costly way of escaping if you don't bother to engage at all. When you consider the rinse and repeat nature of the game teamed with the inevitable loss of game time frequently happening Pirates Code steps beyond 'This week's game' and past 'A career' (like World of Warcraft) into an ongoing marriage like Train Simulator Progress in PC is only marginal but those with a ship fetish who love tactics and enjoyed Playstation RPGs like Ogre Tactics will most likely really appreciate this game especially if they're casual gamers with a lot of free time and a very small game library. And so I have to review by the game's merits and not my subjective lack of interest or ambition to keep pushing onward. In this instance I can only penalize for no resolution options (but the game did auto adjust full screen perfectly to my 16:10 1680 monitor) at the same time praise for the gamepad compatibility which easily auto-mapped my Logitech (x-input compatible) wireless gamepad with no issue. Price point for PC is difficult as back in the day Atlus would've ported something like this over to the PSX asking for a throppy fifty bucks but by today's pricing (and availability of many other titles) I would say that even enthusiasts may want to wait for a $15 sale.

Updated: Since my initial review, the AI has been patched (re: AI freezing), so, a new review is needed. The game is entertaining, the battle mechanics are well thought out, and winning actually needs a little thought put into it - The ability to teach crews different "specials" is definitely a nice inclusion in the game and can help "turn the tide" at just the right moment. It's a fun game that allows you to ravage the seas without getting bogged down with tedious actions.

Excellent, highly-addictive and fun game! You can read my full review here: https://bigbossbattle.com/pirate-code-review-seafaring-strategies/

Solid tun based strategy played on a hex grid. It's had a lot of continued support post launch and the dev is active on the forums.

Turn-based hex strategy games aren't usually my thing, but I'm always on the hunt for a good pirate-themed game. I initially started the game up to get trading cards and also give the gameplay a shot— very quickly this became my favorite game to relax with after work for the past couple weeks. The combat gets quite challenging, but the overall gameplay loop is very satisfying and soothing, for me personally. The visuals and music are great as well! My only complaint would be that I found the story to be a bit lackluster, but still fun. Great game! [h1]8/10[/h1]