Windward
The gameplay dynamic in Windward goes from calm, controlled and thoughtful (if you’re looking for trade routes and quests to build up your towns), to outright mayhem and sudden and repeated death (if you’ve ventured into a tough pirate region, or a combat instance).
These are some basic facts to know, if you’re considering a purchase:
The game begins with creation of a World, somewhat under the control of the creator, in terms of its shape, the challenges it will present, and some other global features. The world consists of a large number of rectangular regions, each of which contains a procedurally generated terrain and oceans, with a few coastal towns scattered in each. The next decision is to choose your starting faction. There are several Windward factions, all of which are allies by default, and each comes with a different set of advantages and drawbacks, which are described to you when you’re asked to choose: maybe you want to get rich as an Exchange captain, or rampage the seas wiping out pirates with Valiant, or … the choices are yours.
– Real player with 885.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Pirates Sandbox Games.
Over all, I do enjoy this game in small doses. The Pirate genre is sadly under-served in video games. I’ve played a few from Sid Meier’s Pirates (which I loved, for the most part), Assassin’s Creed 4 (which is beautiful and interesting, but needs more sailing) to New Horizons 2 (which is for me the absolute gold standard for pirate games.) Windward isn’t as good as those guys. At all. You could forgive Black Flag for not having a robust trading system since it is an action game. You can forgive Sid Meier’s Pirates for not having a developed 3rd or 1st person character action since its focus is on piraty things. You can forgive Uncharted Waters 2 for not having beautiful graphics because of its age. But they all offer something special. Windward doesn’t have a robust trade system so at least it has what the other games have, right? Well, no, the graphics are pretty average. Graphics aren’t everything, at least you can develop your avatar through some sort of story or purpose. Except… you don’t really have an avatar. In fact, there’s no story at all. In fact, the premise is not even “here’s a boat, go and do as you see fit”, it’s more of a sentence fragment of “boat”. Ok, fine. Boat it is.
– Real player with 225.9 hrs in game
King of Seas
King of Seas
King of Seas 💡Overview
In King of Seas
| Genre | Adventure game |
| Campaign | Yes |
| Game length | 25 Hours |
| Difficulty modes | N/A |
| Metacritic | 68% |
– Real player with 26.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Pirates Action RPG Games.
Good game, sailing and battle very similar to the old Sid Meier “pirates!”. Other than full controller support, there’s no reason to play this if you have pirates! I’m also not going to harp on things that are commonly addressed in other reviews (i.e. lack of camera rotate).
No ship boarding, only sinking. Also, aiming is bad - the old game(s) had a larger margin of error - in this game your aim needs to be perfect. Game would benefit from some lines to help aim cannons and abilities (example, voodoo boom).
– Real player with 25.2 hrs in game
Abandon Ship
Version 0.5.something…
It’s… Okay.
A lot of it is very comfortable fun. You find yourself a combat, you watch your little micro managed crew and you snot your enemy. It’s fun in a non challenging sense. You buy 6 crew as quickly as possible, keep them alive with a bit of micro management and use the play style that amuses you most at the time. Simple really. Learning curve is a bit steep at the start but flattens out after a few combats.
The rest of the game at this stage of it’s release? Yeah…
– Real player with 57.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Pirates Real Time Tactics Games.
So the first major update hit, Treasures of the Deep, it wasn’t as big of a shift as compared to pre-release builds versus the first EA build. The update itself is not an expansion per say, but more of a refinement to what we already had, aside the two new mechanics that count, you could say that there are more, but it boils down to just two major ones(more on that later).
Here’s the run down of the refinement from when I last edited the review:
-Improved fps on not so amazing computers
-Plenty of bug fixes
– Real player with 48.8 hrs in game
Blackwake
Pros:
-
frequent updates, always something new (weapons, ships, gamemodes, maps, CANNONS… and AMMO FOR CANNONS)
-
fun gameplay
-
naval combat is well done
-
pvp combat is good, melee is smart, guns will often kill you instantly
-
attack/deffend fortresses (if you capture the enemy fortress you win, when you are defending and you know where all the guns are you may survive)
-
loadout selection, a lot of muskets (4), pistols (5), melee (6), special (4)
-
chat, voice chat (team, faction, global, proximity variants)
– Real player with 387.3 hrs in game
“I will be damned if I go with another early access game, I will rather eat paper from this notebook”
Ok, now I am chewing on a paper but I’m still satisfied by this game! Yay!
Blackwake is interesting multiplayer naval FPS that lend you feeling of member of Navy or life of a pirate (arrr matey, sorry, i had to). The game basically provide ship and sea and you and your crew (that are players or you are part of the crew under captain) try to get opposition team down the tickets or run out of suplies.
– Real player with 211.2 hrs in game
Pixel Piracy
Let’s get the obvious shït outta the way first: I like Pixel Pirates! And yes, I know it’s actually called Pixel PiraCY, but Pixel PiraTES just sounds way better.
Anyway, moving on… I like this game. I really really do. HOWEVER, I cannot POSSIBLY recommend it to ANYONE, simply because of the atrociously poor “productivity” of the so-called “developers” of the game. They CLAIM that their complete radio silence and lack of updates for over eight months was due to ONE guy’s failing health, and while I do wish him a speedy recovery, THIS DOES NOT MEAN THE REST OF YOU LOT GET TO SIT AROUND AND TWIDDLE YOUR FÛCKING THUMBS!
– Real player with 104.6 hrs in game
So normally I would write a more concise review analyzing a game, and looking at all the good parts of it but also all of it’s faults. Pixel Piracy is this special case where I absolutely adore the concept it delivers and the gameplay, but the execution is so god damn awful I can’t bring myself to play it anymore, I wanted to play it to the end and explore everything, have a massive powerful crew that would dominate the seven seas. Instead we’re left with a game that, to put it simply, is badly made. It doesn’t work, and yet it ‘released’ mere days ago. Anyway, here’s a list of about everything wrong with this game that will ruin your experience. Some issues may not seem important but do realize that all of them create unfair situations where the player is not at fault and yet the game will end up punishing them anyway or worse, just straight up giving them a situation they cannot get out of because of the god awful AI. So, here’s the list.
– Real player with 32.3 hrs in game
Naval Action
I have almost 6k hours and belong to a wonderful and very successful community in the game. I actively played and tested almost all content in the game. You can assume that I might know what I am talking about.
I am fan of historical simulation war games. Enjoying Totalwar series for years and particularly attracted to age of sail games thanks to Pirate of Burning Sea. Naval Action is the only successor in the market for this genre now. That is the main reason I had big hopes and enthusiasm toward the game and still playing till another come, mainly sticking with my friends.
– Real player with 6996.5 hrs in game
As much as I would love to see a game like this succeed, I must recommend that you avoid spending money on this game right now. If you are interested, I suggest you wait till it releases and watch the reviews then. Let me explain why.
I have many more hours in this game then is posted in my steam information. I was a closed alpha, pre steam, tester. At the time their was a small group of Russian or Euro testers that numbered, less than 50 as far as I can tell. The second batch of testers, another 50ish, included many Americans. I was one of those testers. I believe that was in early 2014 or 2015. Either way, I have been involved in this game from closed alpha, to early access, to sea trials, to open world going on years now.
– Real player with 2762.1 hrs in game
The Pirate: Caribbean Hunt
Q: Why is being a pirate so addictive?
A: Because when ye lose yer hand, ye get hooked!
‘The Pirate: Caribbean Hunt’ is the best-value entertainment I’ve had for years. Perhaps that’s partly because I’m a fan of square rigger ships and 1700s maritime history.
Sailing sumulators tend to be expensive, so finding one that is an excellent game, was a happy day for me. I think the devs may have made a strategic mistake in not charging for this game. (People assume a game can’t be any good if it’s free.) I think it’s a gem among seafaring games.
– Real player with 438.0 hrs in game
The Pirate is a pretty enjoyable game for any PC player who enjoys this genre. The game was installed long before I started playing it. There is a brief in-game tutorial. Half of the fun is just tinkering with the user interface and reading the tips that are presented on-screen and in the Help menu to learn how to get the most out of this game.
It features a 3rd person world exploration gameplay where you start off with one ship. The tutorial-like missions help you with navigation and basic tasks like buying / selling, repairs and ship upgrades. I rather enjoyed how the designers didn’t lock the player into one style of play or another.
– Real player with 324.1 hrs in game
Commander: Conquest of the Americas
This game is fun but become complicated after some hours of playing, overall its a great game for all the trading possibility and the sea batlles.
Easy to handle but hard to master, and once you are well expanded it could give you headache to set trading route and manage all your colony.
A lots of detailled ships, possibility to have lots of fleet for trading or batlle and possibility to set some automated trading road, exactly like you want them.
Nice graphic both on the map and during sea battle.
– Real player with 138.8 hrs in game
I’ve given this game a bit of time in campaign mode with the advisors. I’ve been playing in difficult mode. It’s a very frustrating and poorly designed game and I don’t recommend it. Here’s why.
The Starting Phase
You settle a colony or two. Then trade back and forwards to your home port. That’s it for an hour or more. Very slow. Once you start producing second tier goods, you start producing more cash and can do more than just keep up with you advisors' demands.
The Advisors
They regularly give you demands. If you don’t meet them, your reputation goes down - and in the end, you get replaced. The demands are not well timed (eg. they will ask you to settle a colony when you are well below the minimum population threshhold for your next colony). Sometimes they are impossible (eg. they ask you to send 50 soldiers to a colony that is less than 50 below the maximum limit). Sometimes they are contradictory (eg. you are at war and one advisor demands you make peace and another demands you take a colony or destroy enemy ships). As you progress and get your colonies going well with all the buildings they need, the advisors are left with fewer things to demand of you and so you get more of these impossible demands.
– Real player with 54.9 hrs in game
Sea Dogs: To Each His Own - Pirate Open World RPG
Heads up, this review is LONG. There will be a TL;DR at the bottom.
This game is a gem, covered in a pile of shit. If you’ve read negative reviews for the game I hate to say that most of them are very much accurate. This game is very unwieldy, hard to learn, harder to master, and really doesn’t teach you anything. The closest this game has to a tutorial is essentially a few hours of being stuck on one island doing small quests to make enough money to buy a small ship. Unfortunately, this means you likely won’t know if you want to keep the game or not until after the refund period has passed.
– Real player with 663.4 hrs in game
Very OLD Akella Pirates game player here when “dinosaurs ruled the earth”.
I basically played the entire game in Russian (no DLC) before it was released in English offline.
I recently went back and have been playing the DLCs online, and my immediate review is still valid in any case.
The game series has been around since 2000. Published by Akella, and eveloped by various studios. This is actually the SIXTH game in the series. Sea Dogs, POTC (Sea Dogs Modification, SD2, the bad disney production), Age of Pirates (AoP) , Tortuga - Two Treasures, AoP2:COAS (City of Abandoned Ships) , and POTEHO (SDTEHO). Black Mark Studios has most of the original modders and designs from the original games. SDTEHO has MANY of the same landmarks as COAS and similar quests. Personally, I am partial to COAS for many reasons, but predominantly the freedom to do whatever the hell you want very early.
– Real player with 504.8 hrs in game
Sea Dogs: Caribbean Tales
I like the freedom to just do what ever you like in the game as far as pirating/trading/missions. And the open world aspect and the way you can capture ships to upgrade/sell or add to your own fleet.
– Real player with 123.4 hrs in game
a nice game, good game play. i really enjoyed it. I cannot confirm the bug reports. The game was stable at all times.
– Real player with 26.6 hrs in game