The Spanish Privateer
Story
Set in early 17th century, just before the Pirate Golden Age, The Spanish Privateer places you in the shoes of Isabel Carlota de Castilla (but you can just call her Carlota). Carlota is an 18-year-old runaway escaping a marriage forced upon her by her parents. Not able to afford passage on a ship, Carlota offers to work for her voyage aboard Captain Rico’s ship, La Aguja. Captain Rico is a privateer, a pirate with a letter of marque allowing him to attack and capture the enemies of Spain. Carlota soon falls in love with the sea, and challenges herself to become a valuable member of the ship.
Amidst sword fights, balls, and drunken nights at the tavern, Carlota learns more about her fellow crew members and the world outside Spain. Visits to the archipelago of Azores, cities in the Caribbean and Veracruz, New Spain, teach Carlota about the effects of colonization and make her question her contribution and power aboard the Spanish ship.
No matter which route you travel down, Carlota must overcome her male crew members' prejudices, earning their respect with her hard work, determination, and intelligence.
Love Interests
Lark
Half Scottish, half Spanish, and entirely charming. Lark is a hired bard whose job is to entertain the men—and he takes liberty to entertain the women, as well. His specialty is playing the lute.
Flint
Flint is the ship’s quartermaster and protector. Fiercely loyal to the captain, Flint is equally distrustful of women. His specialty is gunnery.
Rico
Hailing from Puerto Rico, Captain Rico is no stranger to the sea. His kind and forgiving persona hides the past which granted him his scar. His specialty is swordfighting.
Features
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227K+ words
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100+ menu choices
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Three Good Endings
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Seven Bad Endings
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Six ‘Alternate’ Endings
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Love, Friendship, and Personality Meters
Trailer Music by Alexander Nakarada @ SerpentSound Studios
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
Read More: Best Pirates Otome Games.
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
Read More: Best Pirates Naval Games.
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
Heileen 3: New Horizons
This game is definitely filled with pros and cons. While I did think it was an improvement from the first two games, there’s definitely some issues to be taken with it.
This game has a simulation aspect blended into the visual novel experience. Each day, Heileen has to choose certain activities to do in order to increase stats for skills and advance skills. While I definitely don’t have a problem with simulation aspects being put into visual novels, I must say this game’s sim system is quite tedious. It took me several hours and several playthroughs just to get all of the achievements, because the simulation portion of the game takes far too long. Those who don’t have a lot of patience would definitely dismiss the game quickly. Meanwhile, I almost developed carpal tunnel syndrome from clicking so rapidly and frequently. The basic concept for the activities and stat development isn’t terrible though. That idea is fun, but I definitely wish they hadn’t made it so tedious.
– Real player with 69.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Pirates Simulation Games.
“Heileen 3: New Horizons” is final chapter in Heileen saga of visual novels by Winter Wolves. In short, it’s telling the story of a young girl accompanying her rich uncle (who is pursuing the business in the New World) and eventually getting involved with pirates. It features all you can expect from a visual novel and it features elements of dating and raising sim. The game is running on Ren’Py engine and is not voiced (considering the number of characters, I actually see it as a sensible choice from the developer).
– Real player with 40.7 hrs in game
Space Bar at the End of the Galaxy
I’ve played it through twice. Its got good player interaction for a VN. It also has good character development (as deep as you can get in less then 2 hours), my complaint is that game gives us a variety about Imperial and other factions, but you give no information about them. A few blurbs of imagination that has already gone into the game would help players except the characters be more real. I don’t mind invisible histories, but I nice blurb about them can a long ways towards making a player more sympathetic to them.
– Real player with 3.4 hrs in game
It’s not bad at all but there are better options out there.
I’m really on the fence when it comes to giving this game a bad review. Here’s some points that stood out that led me to my negative review.
Pro’s:
-The writing is pretty decent.
-Characters react in a realistic way to what you choose to answer.
-The character models are good, although with only 5 people ever depicted in game, that’s to be expected.
-The world and characters are actually flashed out a bit, which is rare for such a cheap and short game.
– Real player with 3.1 hrs in game
Sea Dogs
Yes it’s old, but it places its emphasis in sea battles on sailing and strategy. You can’t just load guns in 3 seconds and then switch from solid balls to grapeshot without going through another reload. Turn rate and speed are crucial to monitor. And the story line is fun, too.
– Real player with 94.4 hrs in game
Fascinating game. It was great years ago, and I finished it again with great pleasure nowadays. And that’s not a call of nostalgia. There are many old games which didn’t age well, but I can’t say such a thing about this one. Yes, it’s graphics will not impress you these days and some gameplay mechanics are rather old. But the game brings an enthralling non linear story, great music and atmosphere as well as interesting albeit little clunky gameplay.
The game is 20 years old, but it has unique walkthrough for 4 different nations and unique dialogs for all characters, not just secondary ones, but even unimportant ones. For example, there is no copy-cat tavern keepers or store owners with standard phrases. Each one has his own character, story or even quest. And a word about quests. There is no copy-paste quests as well. Each one is unique and there is a lot of them. Believe or not, but it is the only game where I still remember the names of most of the characters after so many years.
– Real player with 41.5 hrs in game
Shadowhand: RPG Card Game
Shadowhand (Solitaire/Battle-Card)
Options include Full-screen/Borderless Window, Tutorial, Show Blood and Custom Cursor. There are 3 difficulties (Relaxed, Normal, Very Hard), and each is clearly marked as to what is different. Difficulty can be changed before each chapter if you so wish.
The Basics:
Gameplay is similar to that of Faerie or Regency Solitaire, with cards being placed one lower or one higher. The first big difference here is that there are no face cards (Jack, Queen, King, Ace). Instead the cards range from 0 to 9. Zero can go on nine, and vice-versa.
– Real player with 34.9 hrs in game
Shadowhand is a very fun and (mostly) relaxing way to spend an hour here and there. It took me around 23 hours to 100%, playing only on hardest difficulty.
I found it best to play 1-3 chapters per sitting. There are 22 chapters in total, with 8 hands each chapter after the first few tutorial-type chapters. There are also three difficulty levels that can be toggled on a per-chapter basis, with each chapter being replayable, so there is no need to create new profiles.
The base gameplay is similar to the usual solitaire titles on Steam, where you have a stock or draw deck each hand, and the objective is to basically clear the board of cards in sequential up and/or down chains, one card at a time. The card numbers range from 0-9 rather than your standard deck of cards, and there are 6 or 7 total suits.
– Real player with 24.6 hrs in game
Cursed Lands
An outstanding VN-RPG-quest crossover
I was expecting another bland, unnecessarily dragged out visual novel with uninspired, repetitive missions, but I was taken for a real treat here—kept replaying with different initial conditions (race, job, supporting character branching choice) over and over, enjoying every single play.
Visual Novel (VN) perspective: Story branching is rich and, as general VN WinterWolves titles go, you have an almost immediate option to go back—typically less than half a minute in gameplay, couple minutes or hours in the game world—to the last choice and change it to study other outcomes. I like this unique branching feature—it is like a quick time machine, or a very smooth and synoptic reload action that permits me to change my choice without having to repeat a known portion of play and grind once again.
– Real player with 132.6 hrs in game
I bought this game on sale, and I’m glad I did, it wasn’t worth the full price. I bought it because it was created by the same team who did Loren Amazon Princess, a game I loved. It’s unfortunate then, that this game is average at best. There are a few problems I have with this game that I feel affected my enjoyment of the game:
1. Characters/Romance
This is the big one, so i’m putting it first. The characters all had great introductions, and are really interesting. Unfortunately, the game screws this up deeply as it progresses. You don’t get to chose when to talk to the characters, their icon’s pop up when the game decides it’s time for their event to start, so you never truly get to know these characters beyond their surface introduction. The game prides itself on giving you romance options, and even advertises that you can trigger more then one romance scene. It isn’t hard, it’s like the game WANTS you to be a serial skirt chaser, and even when you do trigger these scenes, there’s no build up. Characters will spontaneously confess their feeling for you, claiming they always felt something for you. Your character will reply in kind, but you know this is false. Your POV character never felt anything of the sort, their lying.
– Real player with 41.7 hrs in game
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
This game is awesome! I am replaying it after a few months playing other games right now and giving the turn based system a try. it is great. the combat is different if you play turn based or real time with pause so you can experience two different game styles. i think that it would be a lot better if you had both in one play-through but then again by not having it they make different stats more important for different modes. like dex is more important in RTWP and is absolutely useless in turn based mode, unless you just want to go first every round.
– Real player with 460.1 hrs in game
One of my all time favorite games. A true modern rpg masterpiece.
– Real player with 233.6 hrs in game
Buoyancy
Buoyancy has something special going for it for sure, you know this within the few hours playing it.
However at the 6hr mark (at least for me) I felt like I had already experienced all of the game mechanics and all of the challenge was gone. Population was easy to maintain (even passed 150 pop) and everything else started to repeat itself. The pirates towards the end really weren’t a threat nor were fires and extreme weather threats.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this, especially because it’s a early access title and the low price point still provides decent value. I can’t say this enough, but games like this is exactly why I love early access. Buoyancy is a gem!
– Real player with 33.4 hrs in game
Its still in development but and I have high hopes for it in the future but right now its pretty dumb. For a full explanation continue reading.
Its virtually impossible to set up steady food production because the villagers you have working on water, wheat, bread, beer (yes beer) all the necessary things to keep the colony going just randomly quit there jobs and wonder off. Once your population reaches a couple or three hundred you are pretty much guaranteed to have one of these situation which results in running out of food faster than you can get all the villagers back to work and as a result dozens or hundreds die. Now to get to this point you had to build a large raft. You need a lot of villagers to row the raft around to collect supplies from the ocean. Once you lose a sizable chunk due to one of these wandering abandonments of duties you don’t even have enough people left to row the raft and are basically done.
– Real player with 32.4 hrs in game