PIRATES OUTLAWS Review for iOS

Avast, ye matey, land ho, shiver me timbers! Pirates Outlaws is a rogue-like deck-building card game for iOS, complete with a pirates theme, created by Fabled Game Studio. There isn’t much of an exposition to the context of the game since it is a pretty casual game, but there is a lot of variance and nuance in the game that I’d like to cover, and talk about some of the major downsides to this game that need to be addressed.

I want to start off by saying that Pirates Outlaws is pretty much exactly the same thing as any other of these types of card games, like Hearthstone. And it feels, to me at least, extremely generic. All the cards are incredibly simplistic; even more simplistic than Pokemon, and I feel like that’s a low bar. Maybe the rarer cards that you unlock by progressing in the game have more unique effects, but it’s a relatively long and grindy game. At the time of my writing this review, I had 135 cards out of 366, and I’ve been playing it for about two weeks, just to give you a sense of progression.

Speaking of which, the progression of this game is fairly interesting. The main point of deck building games is to accrue rare cards and destroy your opponent with them. In this game, there is an interesting “campaign” where you progress through islands, which is reminiscent of something like Faster Than Light. These islands may either have enemies to fight and get new cards, randomized events which can cause a variety of things, taverns to heal up and get rid of unwanted cards, or markets to buy new cards and upgrade old ones. There are cards that do damage, apply debuffs/buffs, heal, and shield, along with “relic” cards which you can hold up to five of and have effects on your play.

Rather than directly unlocking cards to your overall collection, you have to gather them up as you go through the journey, which is pretty cool. It incentivizes you to play the campaign because each journey is different from before. It just makes for some annoyance when you get screwed over by RNG. You also choose a character who has a starting deck. I found going for melee cards to be optimal, because trying to fiddle with ammo, which is required for ranged attacks and others, is really annoying and not worth it. The swordmaster character was perfect for this, so I stuck with her after a while.

At the end of a set of islands is the boss. The boss is usually incredibly difficult to beat unless you actually happened to get a good deck, so this was one of the most frustrating aspect of the game to me, because, again, the randomness can really suck. Especially after the second set of islands where you can start randomly having your ship sink. Because of that really stupid mechanic, I haven’t gotten past the second set of islands because it’s always 25% chance to sink followed by 50% chance to sink. The chance may or may not be tied to how many action points your ship has, but it’s not mentioned anywhere in the game.

The visuals of this game are really clean and nice too. The style of the game has a “low-poly” feel to it that isn’t really utilized in a lot of games. The animations are great for attacking too; it feels really satisfying to plop a card down on an enemy and watch them die. However, I feel like some of the character animations were a bit lazy since it’s all just tweening. However, I appreciated some of the nods to other games that they have on some of the cards, like the Arrow to the Knee one from Skyrim and the Heart of Gold one from League (it even has the shell icon!). There is a lot of variation to the enemies that makes it interesting, and you eventually come to dread fighting some certain types of enemies (like the one who shields for 100 every other turn, I found to be really troublesome).

Now to talk about the negatives. Besides the stuff about the RNG (which is extremely excessive in this game and seems to only serve as padding) and the relatively lazy character animations, it is, perhaps expectedly, relatively pay-to-win. Of course, the mobile platform is plagued with microtransactions, but at least most games are moving towards a “cosmetics-only” model. This isn’t the case for this game. While most everything in the game is able to be simply unlocked with gold coins earned through the campaign, you only earn like 20-30 coins per trip unless you get the $5 “permanent double boost,” and a lot of the items and characters in the shop cost several thousand. Sure, you could end the trip after the first boss to get more coins, but you’re incentivized to keep playing even after you beat it, which feels really bad. This leaves you no choice but to grind for what may be several days with subpar cards to be able to actually do anything.

There’s even a character you can buy called “The Admiral” whose base cards (unsurprisingly fitting in with the theme) scale with how many silver coins you have on your journey. With that character, you could actually just negate the entire point of the game with buying stuff and such and just hoarding coins until your coin-based weapons do like 20 damage. It’s ridiculous. There are also booster packs you can buy to get some relatively okay cards added to your overall collection, but again, shelling out money to gain an advantage in game is really stupid.

So for all the reasons that I mentioned, I unfortunately have to rate Pirates Outlaws only 6/10. If you look past the scathing errors, the game itself is pretty fun and addicting, and the campaigns (of which there are three chapters) give enough variety to keep you playing. It’s a nice way to kill some time on your phone while you’re waiting to do something.

Check Out the Pirates Outlaws Trailer:

Pirates Outlaws is available via the App Store and Google Play for $0.99 and contains in-app purchases. For more information, visit here: https://fabledgame.com/