Puzzle Pirates Review

"Hey, I have an idea: Let's make an MMORPG based on Tetris!" Sounds totally crazy, but something like that must have happened when Three Rings Design conceived Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. The result is a fun little Java-based game for the whole family. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is innovative, but is a far cry from a full-blown classic MMORPG. Time to pull out the cutlass, don the eye patch, place the parrot on the shoulder, and sail the Indigo ocean for a review.

Game Mechanics

The first thing you notice when starting Puzzle Pirates is the colorful 2D graphics. Characters have round heads, making them look like Playmobil® figurines. The developers wisely decided that well-made low-tech 2D sprites are cheaper and look better than anything a low-budget 3D engine can deliver. The graphics instantly give you a sense of being in a not-quite-serious pirate world, and are bright and pleasing to look at.

The game starts with a tutorial which covers everything you need to know at the start. The basic idea is simple: You are a pirate, crew member of a pirate ship, and you have to work on several different tasks to help your ship sail the oceans and plunder treasures. There is sailing, bilging the water out of the hold, fixing holes in the ship with carpentry, or loading the cannons. Officers can also navigate the ship and fire the cannons in ship battles.

What makes Puzzle Pirates unique is that each of these tasks is some sort of puzzle mini-game. For carpentry you have to solve Pentomino puzzles. Bilging consists of a 3-in-a-row style of puzzle. For sailing, you need to direct falling pieces into slots of the same color. When loading a cannon, powder, wad, and shot pieces roll over the deck of the ship, and you have to direct them into the cannons in the right order. But the highlight for most people is the sword fighting, which is a multi-player Tetris variant where you need to build blocks of the same color and destroy them. Every block you destroy causes annoying "sword" blocks to appear on your opponent’s screen, until one of you is out. On land the game also offers a "drinking puzzle", which is a sort of multi-player Reversi. And there are several tradeskills, which are supposed to become puzzles as well, but up to now there is only one puzzle.

Ship puzzles generally run against the clock, and the better you are, the faster your ship moves. Then if your crew wins a ship combat puzzle against another crew (usually against non-player crews), you get money (called pieces of eight), and some cargo from the other ship. You might also win maps, which open new routes for the ship to travel on. If you lose, it's not a big thing, the ship doesn't sink (unless the fight was to take over control of an island), your crew just loses some money. At the end of the voyage, the plunder is distributed, and you can spend you money on new clothes, a new weapon, or ultimately your own ship.

Once you are have a certain experience with all puzzles, you can become officer, allowing you to open a shop, and buy, craft and sell goods. There are inhabited islands where you can open shops and meet other people in the taverns, and uninhabited islands where you can find resources such as hemp, which can then be turned in cloth in a weaver shop, and then into clothing by a tailor.
While you can always go jobbing on other peoples’ ships, to make a career from cabin person to pirate and officer, you need to be member of a crew. Crews are player associations, like guilds in other games, and all the ships of their members are shared as a common fleet. Besides playing with your crew, or fighting other players in sea battles, you can also meet other players on the islands, chat, duel, wager, and organize or participate in sword-fighting or drinking tournaments.

The Good Points

Puzzle Pirates is easy to learn, but hard to master, which is generally a good principle for a game. There are no character statistics; your player skill alone determines how good you are at, let’s say, sword-fighting. (The type of weapon you use does offer a minor combat modification). Instead of stats, a ranking shows how experienced you are with the different puzzles. The game has a variety of puzzles, and very little downtime.

The game being easy to learn, colorful, and fun makes it suitable for children. But adults can have a good time too, as long as they are not too serious about it. Puzzle Pirates offers very little to the power gamer, and is much more targeted at the casual gamer.

The game’s economy is nearly completely player-driven, and runs remarkably well. Prices fluctuate with supply and demand. And if you can't get hold of some resource for a reasonable price, you can always set sail to a lonely island where you might be able to harvest it, giving your voyages an added goal besides plundering treasure.

Using mini-games and puzzles in MMORPGs is an old favorite idea of mine. Bigger games would be well advised to have a look at Puzzle Pirates, and implement some sort of mini-games for their tradeskills. Solving a small puzzle to craft a virtual item is a lot more fun than mindlessly repeating the same series of clicks, the current model of crafting in most MMORPGs, with very few notable exceptions like A Tale in the Desert.

The Bad Points

Puzzle Pirates is designed to be a fun little game, not a classical MMORPG virtual world. There are no levels, and no character stats, leading to practically no character development at all. You can buy more expensive clothing, but it just looks nicer, and has no game function. You can buy an expensive sword, but you need to master the sword-fighting puzzle rather well before the type of sword you use makes a difference. A newbie fights equally bad with any sword.

As a social multi-player game, Puzzle Pirates suffers severely from a "too many chiefs, not enough Indians" syndrome. For a big ship you would need one captain or officer, and lots of humble pirates doing all the menial work. Officers get to play more different puzzles, are the only ones able to trade and craft goods, and often get a bigger share of the plundered treasure. So it is not surprising that everybody wants to be an officer, which is easy enough to achieve in a week or so. The oceans are full of the smallest ship type, with only one player officer and three non-player pirates on board. The largest ship in the game could theoretically hold 150 player pirates, but in practice it is rare to see a ship with more than 5 players on board.

Puzzle Pirates is a small game of 5,000 subscribers, but unlike other small games is not developing very fast. The addition of new puzzles for the tradeskills has been slow. There are also a number of minor annoyances in the game design, like how your cash is buried on a lonely island if you have to log off in the middle of a voyage, making it difficult to recover.

Summary

While Puzzle Pirates is not perfect, it is very playable right from the start. As long as one is willing to take oneself not too seriously, the game offers a lot of fun for some time. Lots of players just relax there, try to role-play speaking piratey language and enjoy the various puzzles. But if you are looking for a virtual world in which to develop a long-term career, Puzzle Pirates is probably not the right game for you.

The client can be downloaded for free, and you have a free trial period. After that you pay a $9.95 monthly fee, not too bad in comparison with the big games that are all charging about 50% more than that now. Chinese players can play a localized version at www.puzzlepirates.com.cn and the localized German version can be found at www.puzzle-piraten.de. I am really much in favor of the free client, free trial approach, that lets everybody judge a game on its merits, not just some review, so I recommend you try it out.

This article has also been published on Grimwell
- posted by Tobold @ 10:03 AM Permanent Link