The Pirate: Caribbean Hunt

Pirates may not be a thing anymore, except for a few isolated incidents, but the job was pretty popular back in the day. Hence, everyone was pretty scared of navigating the sea with valuable cargo a few hundred years ago, especially since it was impossible to send distress signals or be rescued in time. However, even pirates had it pretty rough most of time, mainly because they had to spend months out on the sea and the next paycheck was never a sure thing.

The Pirate: Caribbean Hunt is a simulator that allows you to be in charge of a pirate ship and see whether you’ve got what it takes to keep a crew under your command and even turn a profit in the long run. It’s not a very complex game when it comes to mechanics or world complexity, but the gameplay can be quite exciting if you are not looking for something realistic.

As such, most of your time is spent retrieving floating loot that was left behind by other ships, which can then be sold in the nearest port. You can also attack other ships and fight enemy pirates, as well as use the gold you win to improve your ship or buy a new one. There are plenty of options at your disposal, although they are not all as fun as you might believe.

The first annoyance becomes obvious after only a few seconds of game time: the controls. It’s pretty tricky to keep the ship sailing straight, and even more so when the keyboard layout is pretty annoying and you do not have the options to remap the keys. The environments are repetitive as well, which means that it gets boring to explore the world map unless you have a mission to complete.

As for the combat, it’s actually quite simple to understand, but that doesn’t make it good. You basically have to rotate your ship around the enemy and shoot whenever the cannons are loaded, with nothing in between. Granted, it’s possible to buy all sorts of ammo and spice things up a little, but the actual mechanics remain the same throughout the game.

When it’s all said and done, The Pirate: Caribbean Hunt could easily attract a larger audience if some of the components are polished or expanded, but in this state it’s a tad too repetitive and boring to keep people engaged for more than a few minutes. Hence, there’s certainly potential here, but it needs to be unleashed first.