Hello everyone and welcome back to Kralizec Gaming. Today we are going to take a look at Pirate Outlaws. This roguelike card promises fun that is easily accessible in an all-time favorite pirate theme. Originally coming from the world of mobile games it now seeks to find its place on the PC gaming market as well. Whether it can deliver on its promises is the question we will try to answer today. Pirate Outlaws is available on Steam for 19 Dollars and 99 cents or your regional equivalent. And on the Google Play Store, it is available for 1 Dollar and 9 cents and on the Apple Store it is available for 99 cents.
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With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.
Video Review
Text Review
I should start with a disclaimer. While this isn't a sponsored review I did receive the PC version of the game from Fabled Game for free and I would like to thank them for the key very much. I did pay for the Android version though.
But now let us get into the review itself. Soo… where should we start… Considering the large number of roguelike game that is on the market at the moment (to be more precise, ever since Slay the Spire showed how much people like to play them) Pirate Outlaws isn't in an easy position. Plus its a port of a mobile game. Just hearing that will give it a foul taste in a lot of people mouths. So let's find out if Pirate Outlaws deserve your attention.
Gameplay
And as we always do, we will start with the most important part of any game. How exactly does it play?
Mechanically, this is a very simple game. You got a deck of cards which you use to defeat enemies. The cards have three basic categories – melee, ranged, and skill cards. You might guess, melee cards are the ones that can (most of the time) be used only at the target that is closest to you, ranged cards can be used on any of the targets and skill cards are there to either buff you, debuff your opponents, heal, draw, and a bunch of similar stuff. But there is one more category of card, one which the ones among you with any knowledge of card games are currently looking for. Mana – in this case, called ammo. Your goal with all these cards is to defeat your opponents while not getting killed yourself.
Pirate Outlaws, as a card game, works quite nicely in opinion. Cards can combo with each other, learning to use your mana (sorry, ammo) as efficiently as possible is the key to winning, and what I find to be best – its all really easy to understand. Yeah, there is a good number of different keywords in the game but the game also provides you explanations for each and every one of them in a little glossary that is easily accessible. Truly, if you are looking for something even a 5-year-old could play, Pirate Outlaws is as close for a card game as you can get.
And that is pretty much it for the card game part of the game. So it is time to look at the roguelike part of the game. Here, it takes clear inspiration for games like Slay the Spire and just applies a pirate theme. You and your ship start at the bottom of a bay and your goal is to get to the top island where the boss resides. Along the way you get to fight in battles, encounter event, visit shops. All of this to get more cards into your deck and get relics that improve your character in general.
The battles are fairly obvious, you battle one to three enemies and if you defeat them you get a bit of loot. The events can either be purely beneficial, mixed – where you get something cool but usually at the cost to your health, or just be a pure negative. Thankfully, the number of events is good and while you will encounter them repeatedly throughout your gameplay, they never felt too repetitive to me. The only problem I had with the events is that once you get to know how to deal with an event (and if you manage to remember how to deal with it) they become the by far superior way to improve your character. This will quickly lead to trying to find a path that leads you through as many of them as possible.
Then we have the shops, which there are two types of. The first is the tavern, where you can heal yourself, sell stuff you no longer want and get rid of cards that you don't want in your deck. But most importantly, you can repair your ship here as you have a limited number of action points to sail the seas and if you run out of them there is an ever-increasing chance of your ship sinking on an attempt to sail to the next island. The second type of shop is the marketplace. In here you can buy new cards, relics, and upgrade the cards you already have. I found that upgrading the cards you have tends to be a better approach than buying new ones because the smaller your deck is the higher the chance of getting the good ones is.
Next, we need to talk about the two gameplay modes the game has to offer. The first you will get to play is called “Navigate” and in this mode, you will sail through three different areas, where the first is centered around other pirates, the second around undead pirate skeletons and the last centers around the ghosts of pirates. Essentially, they play pretty similarly, but as you move on through the different areas the enemies get a bit stronger, not by that much though. Each of the three areas is split into three smaller maps and each of them has a boss at the end.
The second mode Pirate Outlaws offers to play is called arena. Here it's just a string of up to 30 battles and your goal is to get as far through the arena as quickly as you can. It should be mentioned that when you first start the game, the Arena isn't available, you first have to unlock it.
Each of these modes can be beaten with a good variety of characters which each have their own unique abilities. The basic character you start with, for example, has the ability to get one ammo at the start of each turn. Another one, called The Alchemist has the ability to fuse cards together, or there is The Musician who can switch between different stances which grant him different bonuses. But apart from the first one you have to unlock all the others and each of them requires a different deck-building strategy to actually win with.
Lastly, we have to talk about the differences between the PC and mobile version of the game. I think I have spent roughly the same amount time playing with the mobile version probably getting a bit of an edge as I had more time to play there compared to the PC.
So let us start with the main difference. Price. Twenty bucks on PC and just a dollar on mobile. Well heck, seems like a pretty simple choice to make right? But hold your horses, the price isn't the only difference between the different versions. As you might guess, because the mobile version is so much more cheaper it also includes microtransactions. What you can buy are in-game coins which are then in turn used to purchase everything else. In the mobile version, this includes pretty much everything – new characters, upgrades to characters, skins and even the latter areas. On the other hand, on PC you still have to unlock the characters, but you don't require to collect coins to do so, just gain enough reputation as a pirate that they become available giving the PC version a nice sense of progression and much quicker access to all the games features compared to the mobile version. But if you don't want to wait (in the mobile version) you can just go, spend money and get access straight away. That's the trade-off.
Graphics
So that's pretty much all I think I needed to say about the gameplay. So, let's move on t to visuals. And here, I gotta say, Fabled Game really sticks out. On mobile, the game looks just phenomenally and even on PC, it looks good. The visual style just works. It obviously isn't the highest definition stuff you have ever seen, but on mobile, it just doesn't matter and on PC it still looks pretty great.
Music
In terms of the music, it's the kind of stuff you'd expect. I honestly think that most people will either listen to their own music, especially if they are going to be playing on mobile. But either way, the music is decent, surely nothing to be ashamed of. It just not really exciting and nothing special.
Performance
Before we give Pirate Outlaws a conclusion, there is one more thing we need to mention. The performance of the game. And here, I'm happy to report that the game worked flawlessly for me. Obviously, there aren't any lags or anything on PC, because for PCs the games 2D graphics arent that demanding. But on my fairly low-end phone (Asus Zenphone 6 Pro M2 – a roughly 250 dollar phone) it performed flawlessly as well. Thus, Pirate Outlaws get a good grade here as well.
Conclusion
So… in conclusion: Pirate Outlaws in a cool roguelike card game with a nice theme. It plays nicely and provides you with hours upon hours of fun gameplay. But I'm not sure if I'd recommend it on PC. There is a large number of similar games on PC and while Pirate Outlaws does a lot of stuff well, so do the rest of them. And a lot of them are a lot cheaper than Pirate Outlaws. If you really want the game on PC, go ahead. But I'd wait for the game to go under 15 or ideally 10 dollars before Id pay for it.
On the other hand, the mobile version gets a clear cut recommendation. While there are microtransactions, everything can be accessed through patient gameplay. And if that is the case, I'm fine with it. And since there isn't that much competition on mobile Pirate Outlaws is one of the best roguelike card games, if not the best, on mobile. If you're a fan of the genre and want to play on the go, go and buy it now.
So, that’s it for today guys. Hope you like the review and if you did, please consider upvoting the review and following my blog. And comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.
Disclaimer: All the images have been taken directly from the Steam game page