The game has been abandoned by the original Devs and they've hired another guy to basically do little more than bug fix. The addition of new features is a pipe dream that will likely never come true. Over a year ago the original devs were promising all sorts of things (Multiplayer, a weather system, sea monsters, slaves, the ability to build your own island...you name it). None of these things happened,

The game has Three locations and that is it. Islands, where you kill anyone on it. Sea battles, where you just board a ship or shoot it. Town islands, where you buy things and hire new pirates. At the start the game is pretty fun until you realise this is literally all there is to the game, the mechanics do not develop, new things are not introduced. You will do the same thing you did in hour 1 in hour 100 (Other than shoot cannons). Cannon fights are ridiculous, you could spend tens of hours collecting a crew, training them, equipping them and yet in a single cannon fight many of them will die, making all your hard work pointless.

There is no real plot. No real characters. The music is average. The graphics are frankly lazy, every island is the same and the background for the world is always the same. The gameplay is basic (You order your entire crew with 1 click..you cannot individually select) and it does not develop. Frankly, the Devs should be ashamed for cashing in on an idea and then abandoning it, breaking hundreds of promises they made and hiring some random guy to do little more than take the blame.

Don't buy the game, the developers don't deserve the money and it sends out the wrong message if you do so.

I played this a bunch when my internet was out since it was relatively small (~200 MB) and wouldn't kill my phone's data plan to tether and install. Because of this, my time played isn't accurate - I have about another 10 hours in this game and currently on day 13 of my second save.

Anyway, on with this. First off, there's a lot to like here:

• -Pirates
  
• -Roguelike
  
• -Customizeable crew and ship
  
• -Characters level up, have equipment and skills
  
• -Freeform exploration

But it's just not very good. I waited until it was out of "early access" in hopes to avoid a lot of problems, but alas, here I am. Anyway, the bad:

• -Only the captain is able to follow orders directly - group orders for crew is haphazard at best.
  
• -Crew that learn skills for the ship (cooking, cleaning) will do them on their own accord. In other words: even if the food stores are full of uncooked food and you have a cook, if he's too busy punting ♥♥♥♥ off the side of the ship he won't go near it. This has improved with 1.0.5, but can still be an issue for pirates with multiple skills for the ship.
  
• -Cooks sometimes won't cook food. So your ship starves to death for absolutely no reason. As it stands in my save now I have around 40 in fish that's uncooked in barrels, with 3 cooks refusing to do anything. (This has been fixed as of 1.0.5 - pirates that don't have the ability to fish or clean but can cook will now do so)
  
• -Multiple crew with the "cleaning" skill doesn't make the job go faster. They all scuttle after the same turd and fight over it.
  
• -Managing more than a few crew is a nightmare when it comes to moral and hunger.
  
• -"Animals" tend to charge in to battle. This includes chickens you're rasing for eggs. They don't survive long, and don't listen to orders very well. This makes capturing animals borderline pointless because they will suicide at the first chance they get when your ship gets boarded.
  
• -Custom ship designs tend to screw up pathfinding for your crew. Expect to get stuck. A lot. Don't worry, though! If you grind your ship down to a nub it'll probably fix. Also, the dimensions aren't clear. You'll be building this sweet skiff and all of a sudden you're unable to build in a direction anymore, so you have to restart your design taking in to account this invisible wall. I'd like a grid or something, please.
  
• -It's easier to pump up a captain and have him handle mobs of enemies, since he listens to orders.
  
• -Combat, both island and ship to ship is largely "rinse and repeat". Cannons are fired in a short volley and then sides clash. Fun for the first few hours, gets kind of grating. No events or anything to speak of so far, at least in my playthroughs.
  
• -Many of the items found don't work properly. Sushi, for example.
  
• -The sound effects get old real quick. "JOLLY ROGER. JOLLY ROGER. JOLLY ROGER. JOLLY ROGER."
  
• -The inventory gets cumbersome when you pick up a lot of items. It requires a trip to the store to be able to see all of the things you're carrying.
  
• -Bounty hunter dialogs are slow and interrupt the player when walking around town. Yes, I know I'm on a "quest", stop telling me. On top of that, bounties don't have a set range, and sailing 30 tiles on the map for a bounty is silly.
  
• -Pirates aside from captain will render behind the pirate ships, making it very difficult to track your party. New pirates added to the crew after this bug happens will render properly. There is no way to revert the bug via loading or restarting the game. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=295086852
  
• -Cannons end up severing parts of the ship you're firing at, which makes boarding a problem since pirates can't cross "destroyed" tiles.
  
• -I beat the four legendary pirates, but one of the encounters didn't have a captain. I can't "beat" the game with this save now as I had no prompt for beating the four pirates and the bay I'm looking for was never marked or mentioned after doing so.

Most of this would be better without the bugs, so there's at least hope that'll be enjoyable in the future. Wait for them to fix the game; don't bother with a discount if the problems never get ironed out because it's really frustrating to play a game that is mostly "difficult" due to bugs. Like I said: I was hoping this game wouldn't be the bug-fest I heard it was when they finally pushed out of "early access", but that's not the case.

I'll update this review as things change.

So normally I would write a more concise review analyzing a game, and looking at all the good parts of it but also all of it's faults. Pixel Piracy is this special case where I absolutely adore the concept it delivers and the gameplay, but the execution is so god damn awful I can't bring myself to play it anymore, I wanted to play it to the end and explore everything, have a massive powerful crew that would dominate the seven seas. Instead we're left with a game that, to put it simply, is badly made. It doesn't work, and yet it 'released' mere days ago. Anyway, here's a list of about everything wrong with this game that will ruin your experience. Some issues may not seem important but do realize that all of them create unfair situations where the player is not at fault and yet the game will end up punishing them anyway or worse, just straight up giving them a situation they cannot get out of because of the god awful AI. So, here's the list.

-Crew members acknowledge orders for maybe 1 second before ignoring it and going back to doing something that will probably get them killed or worse.

-Categorizing Crew members doesn't help much because giving them orders is a waste of time when they continue to do whatever the hell they want anyway. This can lead to crew members with no combat experience or health running out against high level pirates for no good reason. The above point also means that no matter how many times you try to move the low level crew member away from combat, they'll still just run back in and get themselves killed.

-Your designated cook refuses to cook because you gave him a secondary job role and he's decided that's more important than cooking food for the captain or any of your crew which leads to the unfair death of you or your crew for no good reason other than the fact your cook decided that patching up the tiny bit of damage the ship took is more important than keeping the crew alive. The same goes for the cook having other jobs like Fishing. The same also happens if they're using interactable furniture like a Card set or Set of Swords. Apparently getting that straight flush is more important than helping your captain not starve to death. The same issue can also occur just from having your ship docked at an island, I don't know why it just bloody does.

-Crew members who refuse to eat even when he's starving to death and you do actually have supplies of food. This relates to the above problem, if they have any kind of job or they're interacting with something menial, they will refuse to eat even when they're low on health because of starvation. This leads to numerous deaths.

-Having multiple people who use cannons and multiple cannons and yet all of the crew members will use the same single cannon which makes it completely redundant, also half of the time a person who can use cannons simply won't for no reason

-Crewmembers in combat refusing to target the enemy you picked for more than a second before choosing their own choice, which most of the time is the enemy with the most health instead of focusing down the person you just spent the last 30 seconds wittling down.

-Ultimate skills are trash, it's impossible to tell when they're actually being used and that's because most of the time they're never being used, they're pointless and in 30 hours of playing I have only seen a crew member use one once, and it was useless

-Selling cargo is useless and yields such a pathetic amount of gold. This is a game based around piracy, where people stole cargo from others to explot for themselves or sell for riches. In this however, you can steal hundreds of weapons, food and all sorts of other stuff and your reward for doing so is 1 gold per weapon no matter how powerful it is.

Pixel Piracy is one of the most annoying games I have ever played. It doesn't listen. I don't think I've ever had to complain about a game not listening to me, where the AI is so brain dead that the simplest of concepts is beyond them, and it always ends up punishing you, for the developers misgivings. I can't recommend this game, please don't buy it in it's current state. This review was written as of version 1.0.4

Also it took them all the way til 1.0.0 to add quest markers.

Really?

Yet another miscarriage provided by early access system is upon us.
Do not believe the release date - the game is as raw as a game can possibly be and features lack of any balance, tons of bugs and deleted features.

Examples of bugs:
- Crew refusing to leave the enemy ship;
- Enemy crew spawning on inaccessible parts of ship, making it impossible to kill them or escape the encounter;
- Crew spawning on inaccessible parts of your own ship after each and every change of loading screens. They refuse to jump off as well;
- Game despawning he island before despawning the actors when changing scenes from island to open sea. May be easily exploited by approaching the same island several times - after 3 or 4 times all island actors will be drowned;
- Crew suddenly clipping through the hull and drowning for no obvious reason;
- Crew attempting to "clean" their crewmates by kicking them off the ship;
- PRESS SPACE TO INTERACT above all other windows, including the tutorial window;
- When playing on low resolutions, long lists of the goods for sale will be offscreen;
- Gunners loading the cannons with bombs endlessly. My personal record - 19 bombs loaded in a single cannon;
- many others I did not mention.

Balance issues:
-Game difficulty wildly varies and even with 15+ crew with highly trained skills and above 50+ lvl I tend to avoid 5lvl+ encounters, since at least five of my crew tends to die during those encounters;
- Rate of morale and hunger decrease varies wildly from version to version;
- There is literally no new content in shops of lvl 5 and higher. Since you visited the lvl 4 shop - you saw everything that game has to offer you. Max level of shops are 8, by the way;
- Crew tends to do everything, but not the things you need them to do. Fishermen will train, new pirates will just idle and cooks prioritise cleaning over cooking which quickly leads to crew starving cause fish was not caught, new pirates in crew dying in first encaunter since training areas occupied by slacking fishermen and once again crew starving to death while there are tons of uncooked food on board. And there is literally nothing you can do about it;
- A single crew member can capture the 8lvl+ ship with proper equipment and training. At this point I just reverted back to captain-solo gameplay on a little boat, discarding all the crew.

Deleted features:
-Food no longer spawn on enemy ships for whatever reason;
-Shackles are available for purchase in shop, promising the ability to capture prisoners during the boarding. Function was never implented, yet the item exists;
- Social encounters, featuring the change of relationship between your crew.

I could add much more to this list, but I am just done. I have no more willpower to force myself through this horrible and frustrating experience.
This is not a proper release, it is just developers feeding off the release status hype and discounts related to it.
Those slackers are so bold that they even show it as something great and to achieve - look at the news. It was just few days since release and they already published 5 hotfixes, while shouting on each corner that they are working hard for their players.
Yeah, they released a first hotfix 40 minutes after release. Second hotfix several hours later. Yeah, for me it souns that they are hardly working, actually.

It is just insulting to post unfini

An unfinished, unpolished gem. This could be a really good game, though even after the full release, the game is riddled with bugs and is generally not an enjoyable experience. Many other reviews cover that. This game is a perfect example of the downfalls of early access.

One of the developers said this on the forums in response to their supposed shady development:

Vitali Kirpu [developer]: "We are not shady, we have alot of funds to fund pixel piracy development for the next 1-2 years or so.

My point is that it doesnt matter for us if the game is early access or full release, updates will keep coming untill nobody ever plays the game."

Take that however you want.. To me it say's "keep buying our unfinished game, and in 1-2 years you may have the privilege of a finished product"

it's an interesting glimpse of the truth of early acsess on steam. For the few good games that have thrived from early access, we as a community are left with hundreds of games just like pixel piracy.

Disappointing.

I'm surprised this isn't Early Access, as it feels incomplete as-is and suffers a few game-breaking bugs. Skills and items, like Ship Repair and Chicken Nests, are obviously not finished/implemented into the game. There are also a few odd design choices that affect the game balance. Certain buffs are able to be applied to all crew members and stack, therefore making the game an odd one where it gets exponentially easier as it goes on. The first island should not feel more difficult than the final boss(es), imo.

Gameplay wise, it's surprisingly similar to FTL. The ship combat and map, at least, have a lot of the same feel. You hire crew (which you have to keep healthy, happy, and fed), and you sail around plundering. There are three location types in the game - islands, towns, and other ships. Within those three, there are a few different flavours (cannibals or hags on islands, big ships or little ships, towns wih differing supplies). With the exception of a few bounty hunter fetch quests, and an option at the beginning to toggle a plague (which I didn't), there are no other events or surprises in the game. It starts to feel remarkably similar after a while, but more content should be on the way. The goal is to beat up progressively tougher opponants for progressively better loot, until you fight the final four bosses (conveniently spread WAY OUT across the huge map). Defeat them, and you get a cute song and the ability to continue playing. I'd suggest watching the cute song on Youtube and buying FTL.

About 14 hours to complete Campaign mode on Beginner settings. I'd say around 3 of those hours (at least) was spent sailing - ie browsing the web in Steam's overlay, and closer to 8 hours if you don't count restarting after bugs/crashes (e.g. reloading caused my first mate to become captain while my captain was still alive, neither could progress).

All that said, it's not a BAD game. I enjoyed it, but have no desire to play it any longer as is. When it's done, it'll probably be a pretty fun open world pirate sim. It definately has charm and personality. Certainly it's not worth the price right now, in Oct 2014. Check it out in a year and see where it's at.

Aside from the bugs that many other negative reviews have mentioned, the gameplay is not that interesting.

Here's how the game actually plays: You pick a location from the world map and then stare at the screen until the ship arrives there. If it's a town, you get off and sell your loot and maybe buy some food. All stores in all towns of the same rank sell the same items, so you'll stop looking at the store's inventories very quickly.
On Islands, you will watch as your crew automatically fights some enemies, then open one treasure chest which always contains some gold and a few grindstones. You could also trigger one random location that either spawns some more enemies or gives you some useless items.
Against pirate ships, you just wait for the enemy to board your ship (or board theirs if they don't do it), watch as your crew automatically fights them and then click the "plunder" button to get some gold and ship parts.

That's the entire game.

Random issues I have encountered:
- Some UI functions simply do nothing if certain preconditions aren't fulfilled, so you never know if the game glitched out or you did something wrong.
- Crew members simply refuse to leave the ship after a few minutes of playing, making it impossible to board enemy ships or islands until you save and reload the game.
- The minute counter of the play timer doesn't revert at 60 minutes, so it showed my play time as 04:273:18 after four hours and 33 minutes of playing.
- The script is full of typos, grammatical errors and horrible dialogue based on internet memes ("Do you even Arrr?").
- The game does not have permadeath, despite what the store page may tell you. Losses won't make you tear your hair out; they'll simply make you reload your last autosave.
- Even if you turn autosaves off the game will still autosave when you exit.
- To use items, you have to pretend that they're an accesory that you want to equip. The help screen doesn't explain this.
- Also, healing items don't get stronger, so when your crew members each have 500+ HP you'll still be stuck with items that restore 5-30 HP. This will eventually make the game unplayable as nearly every enemy will explode on death and deal massive AoE damage to your characters which you cannot adequately heal.

I admit that I still had some fun with Pixel Piracy and that it has some addictive qualities. However, the price is absolutely ridiculous considering that you can pick up games like Transistor or Trails in the Sky for a similar amount of money.

An open world pirate game with old school pixel graphics, yeah sounds great, right?

But what you get is a buggy mess. The AI is terrible, the UI is unintuative and for some reason the graphics are blurry as hell, as if vaselene was smeared all over the screen. Theres a bloom slider, but it doesnt appear to fix the blur.

I must ask WHO THE HELL PUTS BLOOM IN A PIXEL GAME!? Yeah, just what I needed. Light effect on my *pixels*. Really really bad idea. And its just one of many.

This game is supposed to be complete, but it plays like an alpha. Theres no tutorials, enemies and guys spawn in places where they get stuck, bugs galore...I could go on.

In short, awesome idea, beyond terrible execution.

Dont waste your money.

I really want to like this game because i loved terraria alot but, i just cant like it. I would go into detail of why but honestly people already said it. Bad AI hard to tell what crew to do glitchy every 5 seconds you hear Yar Har and cannons are so horrible and op by this point they should just take out cannons also the start can be really hard if you didnt get a pirate BUT for some reason with the right stuff ive seen 1 man crews take on tons of other pirates. The game should be in very early access. This game would be good if they fix this stuff. The devs do show that they care for this game and i hope they can make this a good game. The idea is amazing and the thought of it i love it and i have 400+ hours on terraria and i loved that game but they just made this game so bad. I really want to like this game but i cant recomend it :/

I don't understand why this game has been released.

It's closer than a beta.
Pirates won't do what they are supposed to do, you can't force them to be usefull and all the crew starve because fishermen don't want to fish.
Inventory and global UI is pure rubish.

Not worth the investement.

I want to recommend this game. I really do but at the game's current stage, I cannot. When I first checked that it was created by creators of Terraria, I thought to myself, "Hey, here's a nice lay-back game I could play. The creators should know how to make worlds in this game."

Then I get smacked in the face like just 3-4 hours into the game. The world does seem large and vast with variety in it, AT FIRST. Then after a while, the flaws of the game becomes so glaringly sharp that it just feels dull.

I haven't been to Lv6 or above island/pirate ships yet but except for your possible starting weapon, the Falcon Blade, there are absolutely no unique weapons. Even the Falcon Blade falls short after getting a crew of 5 combat-able pirates. After that it's just a plain Zerg rush onto enemy ships or hostile islands and wiping the populace from the face of the Earth. I guess if you want just a generic army with nothing truly special about them, this works. I wanted to feel special though.

Enemy pirate ships are not RNG encounters. They are actually listed on the map for you to go to beat up. After that, they're gone completely. So while you're traveling from point A to point B, you're sitting there looking at the screen for 1-2 minutes while playing games on your iPhone because literally nothing ever happens. In the beginning of the game, there were a rare instance of a Fishman jumping onto my ship and I had to kill it off but that never happens once you upgrade your ship to a larger one. All you will ever see on screen are your pirates pooping all over the deck, fishing for food, eating, text bubbles going so fast that you can barely read what they say and it's just plain BORING.

The chests in this game are absolutely disappointing. Except for the buried chests, the chests you find on islands and enemy ships yield about 3-10g depending on how many pirates have the 'More Gold in Chests' skill and their levels. Item loots are about 90% of the time grindstones to increase your melee weapons' damage. There are grindstones for ranged but you can only buy those. I would expect an enemy galleon to have way more than 10g and 2 grindstones in their stupid treasury box.

Game looks nice. Feels nice. Doesn't follow through. $10? Well I paid $7.50 since I had a coupon but... I've had $1 iPhone games that I've played for 20 hours so... You doods should wait.

An interesting game with a great all around premise, but has more potential than realization.

Unfortunately, the AI is so shi!!e that what should have been a fantastic indie game falls short on all counts.
There is no real tactics besides mob rushing, and there is no way to dictate tasks for NPCs besides going to a certain location and maybe select specific enemies to attack. No being able to tell a gunner to man the turret, just put him nearby and hope he gets the hint. No way to force the fisherman to stay on task when he goes off to practice his sword skills (with a fishing pole?)

This game should still be in beta. It was released too early and the result is nothing short of pathetic.
4/10

The greatest satisfaction I got out of this game was getting it off the wishlist of my friends.

This game embodies everything that is wrong with the industry. It was released as full game, yet months later they are still adding things like making an end game, and fixing bugs that make it impossible to finish. The only tips and tricks to playing this stunted piece of garbage are ways to avoid game breaking bugs and make the game actually work. Very few of these tips come from the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥s that took our money and told us to ♥♥♥♥ ourselves. Watch out for this dev in the future and avoid any trash that they release. Read the dev reports and you'll see how little work these ♥♥♥♥ suckers do on an unfinished game that we've already paid for.

Great idea, awful implementation. Dev has heart but I can't recommend this one yet.

Oh man...this is so disappointing!
Unintuitive UI, no real tutorial, indirect control of units that don't obey your commands, graphics blurry as hell, lot of bugs and no fun at all.
I read a lot of negative reviews and bought anyway. I regret my purchase.
Maybe Pixel Piracy became a great game one day.
If so, I'll update this review.
At the moment, I can't recommend it.

Give this game a miss.
They fully released this game and it's got a new host of game breaking glitches, I had a smoother time playing this in alpha.
It's very blurry and a strain on the eyes I think this is to do with the bloom settings.

How could this game have been considered ready to publish?

This product is a borderline scam. There are so many things wrong with it I don't even know where to start.

Was it ever even tested? I've played for maybe 4-5 hours and have already found two gamebreaking bugs, and countless minor ones.

The game in general is just completely devoid of polish. Why are there social media links on the main menu? Is this a flash game? The timer would have me believe that I have sunk 2 hours and 159 minutes into my current playthrough. Why did the developers feel obliged to invent a new system of time measurement? Why is there text floating in the air on islands?

The AI is completely nonexistent. Crewmembers will run right through enemies instead of attacking them and will never attack neutral characters unless I do so with my captain. Pathing is horrible. Being given a shorter path and a longer one, crewmembers inevitably take the latter. They also sometimes get stuck on single blocks, which they should be able to climb.
Sometimes they refuse to eat and simply die of hunger. Their salary is random and the game lies as to how much pay the crew wants.

There are numerous design problems that should have been fixed before the game was released. Blocks destroyed by cannons turn into unwalkable floor, which means characters may end up stuck. Caught fish cannot be eaten until you dock and actually place them on your ship. The game is very micro-intensive. I had to switch manually between a fishing-rod and sword for one of my pirates every time I was in combat.

Do not make the same mistake I did. Treat this game as the beta that it is. If you are looking for a finished game to enjoy, look elsewhere.

I stopped playing this game when my first mate started running in circles with a turd in his hand and a turtle on his head. He seemed confused as to whether to join his crew in the tavern or practice swords in the cabin. Or throw the turd away. Or set the turtle down. Yes, this is a problem, and I doubt the excuse of the crew having freewill really addresses this. But more on this later.

Initally it was a fun experience, though the lack of intuitive tutorials made it a little rockier to start than most games. The overall look of the game, the sound of the music, and the grunts of the pirates were all quite welcoming as well. As I conquered each island or pirate ship, things got progressively harder in a maneagable sense. I hired my first mate and named him "Vance the Lance" in honor of the hulking spear he carried. I got a kick out of his former job as a fantastic male model. Qualities I definitely need in my pirate crew.

Whatever the case, Vance and I soon had a larger crew to manage, and that's about when the problems started to happen. Arnold the Brick (because he is dumb as a bag of bricks apparently), had decided he was no longer going to cook the fish he had become so good at catching. I decided to teach another crew member how to cook expecting this to solve the problem. Ironically, this crew member nearly died to starvation because he too refused to cook, despite having both the skill and knife to do so. Meanwhile, Arnold kept providing me fish which I as the player kept placing in hopes of SOMEONE actually cooking it.

The solution to this odd problem was for me to dock at the nearest town and frantically buy fruit for my famished crew.

Now, some would say the real problem here was that the morale must have been poor. I wish I could say this was the problem, but I had my crew loaded with Rum and Gold, thus spirits were high. Nope, this was just an example of poor AI. Which brings us back to my poor first mate.

Poor Vance. I wanted to help him, but he was so absorbed in his turd/turtle ritual...it was bad. And that wasn't the only thing I saw. Many of my pirates couldn't handle things like "crawl over up that ladder" or "walk over there." I was excited to get cannons, but soon I realized that the AI was very prone to getting choked on that as well. My cannoneers would frequently take too long to load cannons. Some would be more inclined to playing cards than loading the cannon. Your game of solitaire needs to wait guys! Cannons PLEASSSE!

Then the fights would happen. I liked the chaos of it all well enough, but sometimes stupid junk would happen. Like swimming. My captain has the swimming skill, but he never seems inclined to using it when he innevitably gets knocked into the water. The knockback can get kinda crazy in the fights too. Thank goodness there is a reloading button..but sheesh.

Then there was sailing. I get the use for it, but I kinda wish there were more random occurences that would just happen to break things up. Something like, mermaid attacks...or giant white whale attacks...or seagull raiding parties... I don't know...Just something! Break up the humdrum of pooping pirates derping back and forth on a fictional ship.

The morale/hunger is the last thing that I think needs a bit more tweaking. Gold is used to pay your crew, which instantly puts them at full morale. Gold is also used to feed the crew when your sailing. You can raise their morale and their hunger (how well fed they are) at taverns. The hunger stat raises reaaaaally slowly, so unless you want to wait all day, your better off buying food for them at the ship (which costs even more gold), or fishing it (which means dealing with finicky AI). They also have to have gold to spend (apparently) to make use of the tavern...but with no way to track what gold each pirate has, it's kinda difficult to keep track of (i.e. When did I last pay them?). It also bothers me immensly that my captain never seems to eat when he is at the tavern. It seems he is damned to eating food on a ship instead of with his crew.

Ah well...I bought the game on sale at least, so I'm not OVERLY disgruntled.

Don't get me wrong. I've enjoyed my time with this game so far...but I think I will stop and wait for them to address some of these issues (hopefully) before I continue my foray into Pixel Piracy.

I'll gladly update this review in the future if some changes actually occur! Until then, Vance and his turd problem shall remain.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDIT:

Thought I might throw some more positives into what I thought about the game:

-Combat is frantic, but I enjoyed the chaos of it. It isn't so noticeable with small crews, but with larger crews it can be a chaotic blast.
-Creating your own boat is an interesting concept as you progress through the game. You always have the option of simply taking the enemy boat, but I enjoy plundering them and slowing adding various parts to my own ship. I'd love to see more cosmetic damage to the ship as you take bombardment shots eventually!
-Charming: I know I said it once before, but I really do like the look and sound of it all. I'm not a fan of all the shanties/tavern songs, but I do think that it is a nice touch. Visually, I enjoy the pixelated nature of the characters and the locales they inhabit.
-Looting makes me feel good, and there is always the chance you'll find something very nice (like a diamond which sells for quite a bit) I'd love to see more of this expanded, but it seems good enough for now. I'd love to see plundering expanded (i.e. attacking TRADE ships vs pirate, or attacking cities, or stealing the food stores off a ship)

And lastly, the management is a positive when the game works as I think was intended. When the AI actually does what you want, and you get into the groove of managing moral vs gold, it is fairly enjoyable. I would tweak it in different ways personally, but I think the framework in place works well enough. (i.e. I'd make taverns more effective at curing hunger, I'd make paying the crew worth less morale to place more emphasis on buying/finding rum or visiting taverns)
------
1.7 Update

The Good news:

-My first mate finally got his life straight and decided to join us on the shore.
-For about 30-40 minutes, the AI felt decent/better and I was enjoying myself well enough.
-Pets are way easier to catch now! No more grinding!
-My captain actually finally decided that bar food is OK. It may have only been a nibble, but that is progress in my book. I sincerely hope they address taverns and make them a little more useful in regards to hunger.(and on that note, I really wish I knew how much gold each crewmember had to spend!)

The Bad news:
-After about 40 minutes, my new pet chicken (called ROBOCHICKEN) decided he is part of the crew now. I caught him practicing with swords and playing cards in a corner. I didn't notice if he was also eating, but I definitely caught the bugger taking a dump next to the larder. I've got my eye on you chicken!
-The AI has gone back to being a reluctant mess. Shovelback Ray (my chief shovel carrier/treasure hunter) refuses to leave the boat for anything.
-The moral system went haywire. I paid my crew as usual, but seconds later everyone went from super happy to "KILL THE CAPTAIN" rage. I dunno...maybe the chicken is promoting a mutiny among my men?

-Eh, Better luck in 1.08 I hope!
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Simple review for you
At it's current state that game is full of game breaking bugs. For example, your captian refuses to eat or you cannot edit your ship while docked. Although the game is great in concept and design, more work needs to be done to flesh it out and crush those bugs.
Pros
+ Intereasting and addictive concept
+ Simple design and controls
Cons
- Horrific and annoying bugs
- Ai managment is abhorrent ( npcs will eat and focus on skill building when captain or boat is under attack)
- Lack of information regarding the actually pregame settings you pick
- Lack of content (As is, this game is more of a proof of concept rather than a complete game)

In conclusion, I say this is a game to watch rather than buy outright. It is up to the devs to fix the most notable issues (being the dissapointing amount of bugs) and add more content to the game. Afterwards, if fixed I would recommend this without a doubt.

Ok before i am judged for my good rating I shall explain. The game has high and low points so to start off I shall give the low points of the game.

1.
The beginning. Honestly I just found the beginning boring i wanted something a bit more exciting than just appearing at the menu.

2.
The directions. After I made my character I was so confused on what to do next. I looked at the help section but it didn't help much. So honestly I dont think it was implemented well.


Now for the good things in the game.

1. The freedom.
I enjoyed the fact that the game doesn't hold your hand. You have to learn how to do things. Its doesn't explicitly tell you. The fact that you only have one objective and that is to beat 4 major pirates gives the player something to work towards while exploring and pilaging like a pirate. I didnt have to go talk to npc's to unlock new areas I could go wherever I wanted. But bear in mind that even though you can go anywhere you should be cautious. You run the risk of sailing into an enemy that could wipe you out in an instant.

2. Creation.
I loved the ship creation the most, you can make what you want and it is awesome. I also love that you have the option of capturing a ship if you kill the crew.

3.
Stats and leveling up.
The leveling up in the game is fun and how you get skills is cool. Also the fact that your pirate can have alot of different skills. Leveling up feels good cause the stats influence gameplay heavily. For example if you upgrade strength alot your character will be a tank that can kill enemies easily,or if you increase vitality you can last longer in a battle. It is small things like this that make it enjoyable.

All in all this game is not for everyone.

However if you are willing to put in a good amount of hours into it you will be satisfied with what you achieve. Especially if you like leveling up games.

I rate this a 7/10