Pirates Outlaws XBOX Review 7/10 🏴‍☠️🦜 @FabledGame #IndieGames #GameDev

Like Willem Dafoe with Madonna’s hot candle wax, I really need to get something off my chest. Before I get into this review. Before I finish the delightful pain au chocolat sat next to me. It isn’t a comment on the game itself, merely the title. But oh, it grates. The game is called “Pirates Outlaws”. It’s tautologous nonsense. Though still a bit rubbish, I’d accept Pirate Outlaws or Pirates: Outlaws, at a push, but not that.

But accept it I must, and I’m glad I did, as I wouldn’t have wanted the game’s puzzling nomenclature to have put me off getting my hands/hook on this booty-full game.

If you’ve followed my Games Freezer output (who hasn’t?) then you’ll know I’m partial to a card-based battler. I love Slay the Spire and still return to that even now, and Monster Train was another I steamed through with abandon. There are a number of games in this arena though, so it is hard to make yourself stand out.

What Pirates Outlaws does well is threefold. Firstly, the graphical style is superb and immediately very appealing. It’s a bold vectorish papercraft style that I really really love. When coupled with good character and card design (as it is here), it can make a game’s visual style pop out.

The second aspect of this game that helps (keel) haul you in is its simplicity. Cards tend to have one of a few different effects, they all make sense and there aren’t reams and reams of text and rules to decipher.

And where there’s a term that’s unclear, the glossary is a click or two away (and I only needed this initially). What this means is that when you play a card, you know what it’ll do. Sounds obvious, but I’ve played others in the genre where you have to do more planning each turn and that would break the flow for me. I guess for some, this is a negative, as there are those that like the extensive lore and intricate interplay between abilities and counter-abilities, but not this salty seadog, no.

And the final element sort of addresses the above issue, while also becoming a negative, and that’s the depth. Davy Jones would struggle to get as deep into this game as you can go. I certainly haven’t managed to get very far and I’ve sunk many hours into it (for this review and also because it’s great fun).

There are game varieties and avatars galore, each with modifiers that change the game dramatically (some characters have more ammo, health, or luck (a bit like being ‘drunk’ in the game which means a 50/50 chance of a miss or a critical hit). 

I would say though, that the rate at which you unlock the different characters is way too slow. As I said, I’ve put many hours in and have probably unlocked a third of the characters. I guess it’ll keep me coming back longer, but with a roguelike setup, I like to feel each run that I’m quite a bit more powerful, not incrementally so.

SUMMARY

So there ye are me hearties. A beautiful, simple and engaging card battler that draws you in, but might tire you out if you don’t have the patience to keep playing (and playing) to unlock the treasures buried deeper within the game.

Pirates Outlaws is available on all platforms but reviewed on Xbox.