Epic Time Pirates

Pirates may not wear black hats and eyepatches nowadays, but there still are a handful of them out there, trying to loot transport ships and capture prisoners. However, things were never as jolly or as amusing for actual pirates as they were for the iconic Jack Sparrow, because a lot of rules had to be followed on the ships, and you didn’t get to disobey too many of them.

Epic Time Pirates is not at all serious and you can tell that from the first few seconds of gameplay. The game is basically a classic shooter akin to Quake, only it uses 2D graphics, a few platformer elements and a silly pirate theme. Hence, you get to be a part of deathmatches and capture the flag rounds, in which two teams go head-to-head against each other to reach a certain score.

You have the choice to choose between starting a new career or trying a quick match instead, although it is recommended to begin with the career. In essence, that is because the career mode also comes with a tutorial to get you started, which makes it easier to grasp the concepts. As a bonus, there is also a thin story running in the background, which is just as silly as the rest of the game, but in a good way.

Since the matches are played between two teams, you get to customize each member of your squad, which is where the RPG elements come into play. The available options are not very complex, but you at least get to specialize them in various ways and make sure that you cover the majority of roles in the team. You can change their names, which is great fun in some cases.

As far as the technical realization is concerned, this may just be a simple Flash game, but the graphics are not half-bad. The animations are nice, and you can tell that the designers put some effort into the levels and the character models. Naturally, there is only so much you can do when you are limited by the tools at your disposal, and especially when you can’t go further than 2D.

All things considered, Epic Time Pirates does quite well for itself, and you can certainly get a few hours of entertainment out of it. However, the relatively high difficulty level and disappointing AI take away some of the fun, because things get frustrating rather quickly.