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The Villain - William Long

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum?

In a world where the gaming industry is booming, you are bound to find games of all types. Here on G.Round, I have played quite a many games. Many of the games you can see my reviews on them on my page, so it was to my enjoyment that when Skyward Digital brought Buccaneers! to us, I was rather excited to give it a try. It was definitely a change up from the horror fueled games I played recently, and I was curious on seeing the direction that Buccaneers! was taking. But unfortunately, as I began to play it, it felt like this wasn't the game for me.


Skyward Digital promotes this game as an Action RPG, and in the beginning, it really was that. Teaching you the controls, you are thrown into a ship battle immediately to take down the pirates. They give you the option to sink the ship or capture it. The controls for this game were rather intuitive and simple. Which is a good thing. Being a first person view game, it was nice to see that the controls worked out rather well. I used both the mouse and keyboard approach as well as the controller approach and both of them felt rather good while navigating this ship battle. I enjoyed the fact that you can switch up between different ammo, and they actually did different things when hitting the ship. I personally enjoyed the bolas because those tore down the sails and forced the pirate ship to stay in place so that I can board them and capture them. This experience was, for the most part, pleasing. Even though first person view games aren't my thing, and I would kind of rather it being in third person, I do see what they were going with this and it works, for the most part.



That was, sadly, where the excitement fell off for me. Once you go back to town and report to the Governor, you are presented with really easy to navigate town format that allowed you to repair and upgrade your ship. You get your first quest and you head back out to the seas. Then the game kind of slowed down for me. The quest really wasn't so well written. "Defeat any Pirate Ship" isn't much to go on. You are just put into an open world without any real navigation and just sailing with limited rations. And while you're looking for pirate ships, the true struggle begins as this game really does depict what it's like to be on the open sea. You are just left there waiting for SOMETHING to happen and there is so much downtime. Now, maybe this is just a miscommunication on my part. Maybe I didn't understand something specifically, I am willing to admit that because everyone perceives things differently, but I spent so much down time just sailing looking for something and it took forever before I finally found a ship. This kind of killed the mood for me, and sapped my excitement from this game. It felt TOO spot on to what it's like to being a captain of the high seas. With that being said, the graphics and the sound quality was nice. The audio really did give that great feeling of being on a ship, combined with a nice stereotypical soundtrack for games like this. It wasn't amazing, but it wasn't bad. Was again, very accurate. With the graphics giving that Minecraft feel, though it isn't my style, it did work for Buccaneers! and overall was above average with the lighting and shadow effects. There really isn't much to really point out or to address because in this department there wasn't anything that really stood out to me. It wasn't extravagant, but it wasn't bad, just above average.



Overall, Buccaneers! is a pretty average game that really does stick to the troupe of being on the high seas. If I had to make changes, I would probably make the quests more direct, or at the very least put more things to do in the high seas. Maybe put more pirates in the open world, or make it easier to track them down. Though I feel like they wanted to give you that realism and authentic feeling, having so much dead time, again, really drains the feeling from the game. At this juncture this game really isn't there. But that is the beautiful thing about putting out alpha versions of game titles. You get to have them play tested and keep play testing till you can finally bring out a quality product.


I do want to see how this project proceeds and grows in the future. It's a game that I want to keep my eye on because it can go either way at this moment. I'm curious on just which the future holds for Buccaneers!.

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