Swords & Crossbones: An Epic Pirate Story

Swords and Crossbones is an interesting game. It's a lot bigger and more indepth than I was origionally thinking it would be. The game's exploration element took me by surprise. Though it has open world elements, I wouldn't really call it an open world game. You can look around but generally you'll only be getting quests on a specific island and if the quest isn't there there's not a reason to be there. Unlike some people on here I actually like the music. The sound effects are kind of cute but get annoying after awhile. The music is actually one of my favorite parts. The waiting around for resources can be annoying. It looks like it's based on a lot of those weird freemium games models. Though as this game is something you pay for and there's no reason to wait around I don't know the point of that. However I do rather enjoy the whole building buildings on your own island and setting it up. Moving them around is a bit too expensive but some good planning keeps that from being an issue. I'm a sucker for tactical rpgs and this seems like a doozy. The early stuff is pretty simple but things start getting more fun once you get off the main island. I think so at least. You start exploring and fighting pirate bosses and that's pretty neat. The graphics are charming as well. But I grew up in the era this game is kind of mimmicing, so it's right at my heart.

It's not horrible so far, but the UI is pure pain. No tooltips either. In order to attack an enemy (which is especially early one the only action you can do): 1) Click "Actions" 2) Click "Attack" 3) Click on target (The pseudo-height means this is sometimes quite difficult / buggy) 4) Click "Confirm" Instead this could be changed into: 1) Click on target to attack (Alle relevevant information shown as tooltip on mouseover) Or another example: KO-Units block movement. In order to walk past them you have to use the action "swap" to swap position with them. It's just terrible UX design.

First off, i haven't finished the game yet, but i'm planning to. This should already tell what i feel about the game: I truly like it. The turn-based combat is solid. There are enough enemy units and crazy bosses to play for a while (30+hours). Each unit has its own use, being effective in its own way. The "create your own pirate island" part wasn't important to me, i just hoped it wouldn't get in my way: I have to say that it's quite fun to figure out where to place buildings and decorations (the last enabling to upgrade the first). This game is not an open world game like i thought, but the exploration part is still consistent. I also love the art and dialogues, some cliché of 8 and 16 bits RPG are turned into puns and jokes in a satisfaying way. If you like turn-based combat and pirates, go get it! If you like building up characters/cities, go get it! If you're none of the above, take a look at some vids and...decide to pick it up now to help the devs.

Swords & Crossbones was a very interesting game for me to play. It's basically a "Tactics" game, following the Final Fantasy Tactics combat-style, which is essentially taking a normal JRPG and adding terrain to its combat. Now, units actually move around, have AOE abilities, etc. etc. which adds quite a lot of depth to the more traditional JRPG combat, with a few new interesting possibilities. I have not played any of the tactics game, but I remember one of my friends playing it. This game made me want to go back to those games (which I'll do, sooner or later, now) in a very unexpected way. The ideas of the game are cool, and I really had a blast in the beginning. Unfortunately, and perhaps due to the mobile roots of the developing team, the game ends up falling apart after a couple of hours. It's full of potential, though! Especially since it's a genre that I don't think I've ever seen on PC (not often, at the very least). I won't write a long review, just focusing on a couple of points that I feel were very relevant when I was playing. Going against some other reviewers, who claimed the game to be both "deep" and "casual"... well, I wouldn't call it depth, as much as [b]breadth[/b]. The game does a lot of different stuff. Not only does it have the Tactics combat, but it also has a city-builder element, where you must manage resources in order to build a growing island, to construct buildings that provide resources or upgrade possibilities for your characters. It also has some exploration element, where you sail to find new islands (unfortunately purely linear, going along with the story), and some other repeatable quests. I disagree with the "depth" because of a single, yet huge problem with the game: the combat is too easy. I've spent most of the game without even knowing there were abilities (the game explains everything in the first 30 minutes, while some of the things are unlocked hours after the fact... later), and even then, the combat provided no difficulty at all. This is mostly a problem when you realize that the whole upgrade/skill system is rendered pointless. Which, in turn, renders most of the city building system pointless as well. It lacks depth in the sense that you'll never have to think about the combat situations you're in. The game is also very much extended by repetition (again, mobile roots), keeping you stuck in the gameplay loop of discovering islands to unlock more upgrades, to discover more islands, to get more upgrades, ad infinitum. Well, not again infinitely, but for far longer than it should. So, except a lot of the same battlefields, enemies, etc. while at the same time requiring no thought to get through it. It has an interesting button: auto-combat. The AI isn't very good, but it works. 5 hours in, I stopped playing most battles. There was no point. I just hit the little button, and very sub-optimal AI would do the obligatory grind for me! This is not enough, since the UI requires you to still click quite a lot of times to get the auto combat started. There are a bunch of problems created by the previous one. Random encounters during exploration, some obligatory battles while you're doing the main quest, etc. etc. If the combat was well tuned, it might have been good. Unfortunately, the game is mostly a skinner box. It would almost work better as a clicker game. And this is all very unfortunate, but it's a useful example to have, I guess. The game seems very cool. The visuals are pleasant, the writing was actually good (I was laughing at the start of the game! And I rarely appreciate the writings in videogames), and the various system had incredible potential. The combat system and skills may have even been good, if the enemy encounters were balanced. As they're not, the game turns into a huge, huge grind... There's no point. I apologize for just hitting the same point over and over and... But that is the single problem that ruined the whole game, for me. If it was shorter, I would have enjoyed it, as I would not have experience much down town. While I was learning the systems, it was cool! After that, the game couldn't keep up and still extended itself (rather artificially) for a good 10+ hours. You have a bunch of characters, equipment upgrades, etc. You never get to explore any of it. With all this said, I look forward for the developers' next game. This was so close to being great... hopefully, they'll take similar concepts, but with a larger focus on the game's core, instead of all systems that are mostly skinner boxes.

This is what happens, when you port a mobile/tablet game to PC. And it's not good. I want to like this game, I really do. But I can't, due to how it treats a player. Pros: + Nice art. It's bright, and vibrant, and 8bit-ish. + Pretty good tactical combat. Cons: - Worst UI possible. - Pretty bad tutorial. - Dialogues are terrible. As is the writing in whole. - Very monotonous gameplay (especially combat). I'm not sure why devs decided to re-invent tactical combat -- concept is as old as the time itself, and there's a plenty of good examples where it has been made a lot better. Alas, their efforts to make something "original" turned into very boring and repetitive grind (which goes for gameplay here) and anything but friendly UI. Sadly, I can't recommend this game to anyone.

This trailer of the game seems very promising: as a pirate for revenge, you can gather resources, build your village, rescue fellow pirates, and level up your party members. The combination sounds very attractive, right? Yes. Has the game actually delivered all the playable elements? Yes. Is the game fun? Kind of. Is it recommended? Of course not. Graphic: I'm generally neutral to Swords & Crossbones in this aspect. Music and Sound: I turned both off after 1 hour of game play, so you know what to expect... Game system: All the elements they showed in the trailer are present, however, they seem to be spliced together by weak glues. None of them is outstanding, and their combination does not make things any better. The battles are boring and unbalanced. Control: This is the WORST user interface in game I've ever seen in the past several years. For almost doing everything, you need to do at least twice the clicks as that you would do in another turn-based strategy game with an average-level UI.

Swords & Crossbones, aka Dark Cloud Tactics! Well, kind of. ;-) I bought this game for a mere $3 during the Steam halloween sale, not expecting anything spectacular, but I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by this game. I started it up for the first time planning to kill some time waiting for some other games to download/install, but then I just ended up playing Swords & Crossbones for like 5 straight hours. [b]COMBAT:[/b] On one hand, it's a tactical RPG. You're going to be fighting lots of battles where you move specialized units on a grid map and engage enemy units in turn-based combat. As your units participate in battles, they gain XP which levels them up and improves their overall stats, but they also earn Ability Points which can be spent to unlock and upgrade their unique abilities in whatever order you like. The game follows essentially a revenge plot, where first you have to go one-by-one bust your pirate friends out of various island prisons, which is how you get your new recruits. There are various bosses to fight as you go. When you're on a battle map, in addition to just plain old fighting, you can also trap non-human monsters and use your thief to open locked chests that randomly appear on some maps. Maps also frequently include powder kegs, which you can hit with a ranged attack to blow up and deal massive damage to any units standing directly adjacent, which is useful for kiting and damaging more difficult units. [b]MANAGEMENT:[/b] When you're not in combat, the game shifts to being a sort of simulation/management/trading/economy type game. Your pirate band takes over their own island and starts setting up houses, storage buildings, a tavern, a pier, etc. You have to build a house for everyone in your party if you want them to work for you (otherwise they just stand around doing nothing). You recruit various non-combatant NPCs onto your colony that take up professions like lumberjacking, farming, building, smithing, mining, cooking, etc. You have to build a house for all of these people AND a shop for them to engage in their trade. Your combatant allies will serve as generalized laborers that help carry resources to storage. The resources you create can be sold directly or they can be used to build and expand. A little later you can even start a thriving tourism industry on your island, once you're able to build leisure/entertainment businesses. There is even a weapon/armor crafting system, although it isn't entirely available until several hours into the game. [b]EXPLORATION:[/b] This was the surprising part. You also have to explore in this game. When you first land on an island, it's covered with fog and various battle symbols that show each unexplored section of the island. You have to battle your way through each section to uncover it and make it passable/useable. On your home island, this makes the land useable. On islands you visit on the ocean, it just makes that area passeable or sometimes unlocks hidden objectives or reveals underlying towns where you can rest your party or pick up missions. Exploring over land is pretty simple, but exploring over sea requires a boat. The boat can only hold so many party members at first, so upgrading to bigger boats that hold more party members is an obvious goal. You also can only stay on the open water as long as you have food supplies on board (which you bring with you from home or catch using a fishing equipment upgrade). If you run out of food, you are forced to return home immediately. All in all, it's a fun combination of tactical RPG combat, simulation, and exploration. It's pretty cartoony and lighthearted as well, which I tend to prefer over grimdark. Does the game have any downsides, though? Yeah, a few. The tutorials don't explain certain aspects of the game clearly enough, so you should be prepared to be somewhat confused at first on how certain systems work. For example, the game explains to you that upgrading buildings requires meeting certain decoration requirements, but the game doesn't sufficiently explain the symbols used in the decoration system, what they mean, or what to do about them. There can also be a certain point at the beginning where you may feel frustrated because you don't know if you should be focusing on exploring/fighting or just letting your economy run and focusing on development. It would also be nice if the game had some kind of hotkeys to use for battles instead of making you click all over the place, but clicking all over the place you will have to do. I also feel like there is a huge disparity in the usefulness of abilities, with some of them feeling extremely helpful and others being so heavily penalized (e.g. using a lot of abilities forces you to deal 0 damage in exchange for inflicting a status effect, but the status effect usually only has like a 30 to 50% chance to hit, so when you first learn them they feel pretty useless). It can also be frustrating that enemy units use status effects so aggressively, and your only defense against it is the healer's "remedy" spell, which only has like a 30% chance of success, which again feels like a pretty steep handicap. But you CAN get through it. I also encountered two bugs while playing, though it wasn't so bad, since they turned out to be the kind that help you. On one particular island, there were two battles in a row where I placed my units and clicked the "ready" button to begin the battle and was immediately shown the VICTORY screen as if I had won, but not a single unit had moved. I still got all the loot and XP though. It would also be nice if the ships or units, when traveling on the map, would cancel their current destination when you click on a new destination. At present, they will continue traveling to wherever you first clicked and won't recognize new clicks until they reach wherever they're currently traveling. It's not so bad on land, but it can be annoying on sea where you have rations to worry about and they get burned away because your boat isn't smart enough to abort the current destination and switch to a new one. But it's still manageable. Just use short "baby step" clicks to your destination and you'll be alright. Finally, I wish there were something like secrets or treasures or some other kind of unique discoveries to make when exploring. Even though you can explore and fight as much as you want, your progress and objectives are still ultimately pretty tightly woven to the game's story missions. I like that the game has sidequests available from the tavern, but it would be nice if there were some sidequests that were a little more interesting than just battles. Overall, I am pretty pleased by this game. I would love to see a sequel to it or just another game similar to it that expands on the ideas and makes both the TRPG half and the exploration/management half even more complex and engaging.

Overall, I would recommend this game for the sake of the comic tone and the play, which is similar to Beastie Islands from Keiro. Several points of improvement : The game is too easy, as long as you improve your main character and his gunner before moving out. All I had to do was to fight the crocs and bird on my main island a few times and I am OP for the next few islands. The building process is too troublesome. It is hard to find the correct building I want in the midst of all the others. For example, I need to upgrade the house of the correct person before I can upgrade his workplace. But I can't find it if there are 15 more people on the island! The production for the basic commodities (food, wood, cotton, etc) is too slow, in the end, i just go out there to salvage shipwrecks and use the gold I find to buy commodities. The MMI for buying and selling commodities needs to be improved. I have tons of money but need to buy tons of wood and food to build stuff. Unfortunately, I can't buy it in the same store window and have to move to find the market place. At the end of the day, I can easily leave the game to idle for half an hour and find my stores all filled up to use. But those said, the game is still recommended for the comic relief and turn-based strategy fights. I love the references to several games I have played before within the game as well as other characters in real life. The varying terrain and combat maps are good. The difference classes are varied enough with their own strength and weaknesses to make the strategy very interesting. I love the exploration sailing, simply to clear out the map and go from port to port. Perhaps add in a trading aspect to the game? I also love to build my own island. I practically spent more time shifting things around so that they look nice and function than sailing around... I do wish that the tourism aspect can be more complex, like making the tourist visit the party's houses to offer them unique weapons and quests? 3 more things to add. 1. Pirates whom are added on later in the game ought to start with more training points for their skils or at least have some skills already invested in 2. The barbarian's weapons skipped a level in production as the Executioner's Axe and the one below it require the same weapon for upgrade 3. The zoo and aquarium are hard to fill up simply because the monsters are too weak and get killed before i can capture them

decent game, ♥♥♥♥ port! 7/10 - meh port, got some bugs - using ships to sail around is buggy as hell. + auto battle feature for maps you already won - auto battle can break the game from time to time, - crashes, make sure to SAVE ALL THE TIME!!! - a little on the grindy side just waiting for items that you can then sell for gold - lacking useful hotkeys + wide variety of combat moves + only 5$ + easy to 100% achievements, takes some time tho - crashed 4 times during the last battle

I was first turned off by the awful dialog. Then by the awful ui experience of controlling an entire tactical battle with mouse clicks (click action, click attack, click enemy, click ok, repeat ad nauseam). I admittedly didn't give this much of a chance to hit it's stride -- but I don't think it ever would have. It seems doomed to grind even further to a crawl.