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Game length provided by HowLongToBeat
Posted on: July 26, 2025
Seeker69
Verified ownerGames: 144 Reviews: 8
An entertaining if aged classic
Runs fine on 11. Controls are... antiquated.. but not bad.. a good game..
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Posted on: August 12, 2025
Ramevox
Verified ownerGames: 650 Reviews: 68
Fun but burns out quickly
Pirates! is a very enjoyable experience, up to the certain point. The game's mood is top notch and the gameplay loop is engaging. The simulation in the background is impressive. The game really gives you a great deal of freedom in choosing what to do and how to do it. You can be a real pirate, a corsair, side with one country, be neutral, or wage war against everyone. You can trade, discover lost cities and pirate treasures, romance governors' daughters, collect artifacts, and compete with other pirates. You need to regularly divide the plunder with your crew, which resets your resource accumulation a bit and shakes up the world simulation. However, the game quickly runs out of surprises, where it forces you to repeat the same small selection of minigames, which only increase in difficulty if you choose to advance pirate ranks between adventures, but doesn't introduce any new mechanics or even smoke and mirrors to what you've experienced in the first couple of hours. You just repeat the same stuff for increasingly less enticing rewards. The family story line is bare bones and boils down to chasing the same two (!) pirates throughout, until you discover their hideout and defeat the antagonist. It gives you some cash and a non-gameplay affecting crew member. Open world sailing quickly gets annoying and a time sink due to the attempt of wind simulation. It's a neat and a deep system with the selection of different ships, but compared to the simplicity of the rest of the active gameplay systems (minigames), it effectively acts against the game where most of the time spent dwindles to manouvering your ship back to the east to the whims of the wind which predominantly blows in one direction. I get the appeal, and Pirates! really is one of the top games with the pirate theme ever created, but it's still a bit disappointing the more you play it.
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Posted on: August 31, 2025
dabl100
Verified ownerGames: 12 Reviews: 4
Small Windows bug killing me games yarr
It's a classic game. More fun at higher difficulties, once you know the basics. The game has crashed on me twice at the end of tavern bounty fights on Win11. Since there is no autosave, this is a problem.
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Posted on: December 30, 2022
odd_customer
Verified ownerGames: 542 Reviews: 5
Sailing
Annoyingly many games set in the age of sail have square-riggers handling like cars or motorboats. As much as Pirates is an arcade game, it gets sailing more right than many others: square-riggers handle like modern yachts, getting to about 45° off the wind. Sure, it's still quite forgiving (I think realistic for square-riggers would be about 60°, which might not have been much fun anymore; they were quite horrible windward), but at least it feels something like a sailing vessel. Sloops can outrun square-riggers by sailing close-hauled but lose on tailwind. Sails are fairly well animated with a appropriate shivering sound if you get too close to the wind. Ship battles are one on one or sometimes one on two, your flagship against two enemies. Normal cannonballs, chain and grape shots are available for targeting hull, sails and crew. Aiming broadsides takes a bit of practice: there are no sights of any kind. Boarding fights are duels with the enemy captain, difficulty depending on how much crew each side has.
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Posted on: August 6, 2025
BartekKwapisz
Verified ownerGames: 10 Reviews: 1
Short but enjoyable
+ Variety of funny mini-games + Sense of adventure + Interesting economic mechanics + Enjoyable and relaxing + Satisfying sailing mechanics and ship upgrades ? Potentially addictive - Awful storyline (you keep chasing the evil Baron Raymondo over and over) - Sometimes feels like a demo or early alpha version - Repetitive; gets boring quickly
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