Zombie Pirates

Developed by Dust Devil Studios

Zombie Pirates may seem like a fresh casual game of ship combat, but this is likely one that you have played before. Probably not this exact game, but one very similar. In Zombie Pirates, you spend each level fighting off waves of enemy ships waiting for the progress bar to tick down to the end of the stage. Along the way, you collect powerups and coins that help you to deal with the enemies and create new units to fight for you. As the game gets more complex, you end up commanding fleets of ships, but for the most part they stay stationary in a grid-like pattern. A very casual game that relies heavily on repetitive gameplay and at times a luck based system of what items spawn, this is one that gets tiresome far too quickly.

On each stage, you take control of Smilin’ Jack O’Hurlihan. Your main goal is for him to survive and luckily you aren’t alone in this endeavor. Once you get in close proximity of an enemy ship, you auto attack until you or the enemy is dead. Rinse and repeat. As each enemy ship falls, they leave a chest for you to collect by clicking on it. Each chest contains one of three items; a parrot, a pint of grog, or a TNT barrel. The parrots, oddly enough, are the currency of this world and you trade a set number of these in for reinforcements. The better the ship you are calling in to battle, the more expensive the cost. These range everywhere from simple skiffs to ships that throw chains to stop the enemies to even advanced allies that launch magical cannonballs. Pints of grog are used to heal your ships after they take damage and prove to be extremely useful. TNT barrels are arguably the most useful of all the items and do a radius of damage around wherever they are dropped. A well placed barrel can take out a large number of enemies in one quick explosion.

The main appeal of Zombie Pirates is the use of all of these items strategically by calling in the proper ships for each occasion. Once you figure out a set formula, it seems like the same combination of ships can easily overthrow any group of enemies. Different types of enemies seem to have different weaknesses, but most of them attack similarly and just have a different amount of hits they take to destroy. Groups of enemies such as murderous crows can only be taken out safely using certain types of units and large boss fights do a great job of decimating your troops if you aren’t careful. All of the ships have the capability to move around, but for the most part if placed right they can just sit in a grid and do all the work for you easily. The only exception to this is in later areas islands begin to spawn around the map that block your shots and may require you to move.

The graphics of Zombie Pirates are extremely basic and seem about on par with the quality of a flash game. Animations are minimal, the story leaves much to be desired, and the audio is very generic. Unfortunately, there is just nothing in this game that stands out and sets it apart from the rest of the crowd. The graphics are colorful, but this is just white noise in an already overflowing genre of casual games.

Beyond the lack of variety in the game, there are other core problems that exist. Options are extremely basic and could use some more advanced options to make it run a bit smoother. For some reason, when entering my name at the character creation screen, it seemed to only register my keystrokes very occasionally. I had to slow down my typing quite a bit just to get my name entered in to the field. Beyond just some basic troubles I had with the game, the biggest problem I have with it is I feel like I’ve played this game before. At times it feels like a tower defense game, but the direct comparison I just have to make is that Zombie Pirates feels far too much like Plants vs Zombies. I’m in a world where I’m collecting items, building units with them, waiting for waves of enemies to end before I move on to the next stage. There are a few stages that provide variety, but for the most part it’s just the same old repetitive gameplay. The big difference between this and games like Plants vs Zombies is that this game lacks the necessary polish to make it as good and take out the aspect of what I feel are “unfair deaths”.

I really don’t enjoy this game. It’s not that I find it terrible or unplayable, it’s just that I found it to be rather boring and by the time an hour had gone by I was eager to stop. I also feel like the pricing at $14.99 is just a bit much for what you are getting out of this game. To be fair, I have not seen all the content and I have definitely seen some Steam reviews from users with a large amount of hours played, but I can’t see this game lasting the average person more than 5-7 hours. If you’re really in to casual tower defense games, maybe you’ll be in to this, but I definitely can’t recommend it to you as I likely will never play it again.

For the boring statistics part of this game, I played it for 1 hour and 2 minutes and played through the first two worlds.