Terraria meets exploring island on your ship with your crew, fighting enemy pirates, finding treasures and dying of scurvy, Pixel Piracy is an odd one. I definitely think it's an interesting game, but some of its mechanics are a bit on the cumbersome side, some of its systems are bugged in ways that hurt the player way too much, and it's progression leaves a bit to be desired. That being said, I still had a great time with it and managed to overlook its few flaws.
After creating a new world and selecting a few parameters - if there were more monsters, mysteries or dramas, and creating my character - a random pirate captain, I was thrown into the tutorial for the game. The world creation aspect is a bit weird because while I get that this is a permadeath game - if your captain dies, it's game over - besides one weird bugged death, I didn't come even close of losing my captain in my whole time with the game, prompting me to wonder if you'd even remember the choices you had made during world creation and if they really mattered. The way the game works is simple, you have various crews of pirates and you right click to move them, moving your captain avatar with the left mouse button.
Everyone moves way too slowly, especially when you're done with an island or with a city and all you want is to go back to your ship. Having to watch your dudes move all the way from one side to another without anything to do in-between is plenty boring. You visit a bunch of locales, from towns - complete with random bounty boards, shops and taverns to recruit crew members - to islands with pirates, skeletons and other dangers. To do so, you select your destination on a world map that gives you a somewhat vague idea of what's at your destination, then you wait. This mechanic - although contextually appropriate - is really annoying. You just wait for a percentage meter to fill up. I really wish the movement was instantaneous in this game, waiting for things isn't fun.
Both during exploration and ship combat, you can direct your crew to move and they'll automatically attack with a bunch of different weapons. Flails, cutlasses, special swords, guns, rocks, shurikens, there is a wide range of gear that you can find to equip your guys, all with different properties. There are also six stats that you can level, a bunch of passive and active skills to give to your people and passive gear you can equip. I love customization and this game gives you plenty, too much, even. Having a ton of different ways to customize a team of characters is fine, this loses its meaning when you can have forty of them. Some skills are useful to pirates that will stay on your ship at all times, like cleaning and ship repair, but the combat skills all blend together and you might end up with a bunch of similarly interchangeable pirates, which means that there's not really customization there.
The goal of the game is to defeat the four legendary pirates that each lurk at the corners of the map with ominous "Danger 10 000" ratings. Compared to the 1-5 that I had encountered so far, this is a step way up. To navigate up to that level, you need to build up your ship with blocks you buy in stores or from plundering enemy vessels after killing them all. Ship building - at least where I was - seems like a purely cosmetic endeavor. It's not like you 'have' to create specific rooms for different things - cooking, pooping, training, storage, etc. - so you can just make any shape you want and it'll float. There are some items you need to place here and there - food mostly - but as long as your crew can find its way there, you're fine. Some other elements like sails have a direct impact on mechanics, but they're too few and far between.
In any case, Pixel Piracy is a fine game that could keep you busy for a long, long while. There are plenty of islands and ships battle to be had - even if they feel like they repeat way too much in actual gameplay - you can build up an impressive fleet of pirates and charge at enemies with numbers on your side and you can dig for treasure, tame goats and shoot cannons. Be careful with some bugs tho! My first captain died because he was climbing up the ship and I set sail without noticing that he wasn't entirely inside, causing him to appear above water, falling in the ocean, and drowning.
