Assassins Creed Pirates Windows Phone Review

In cooperation with Microsoft, Ubisoft released a demo of AC Pirates as a browser game a couple of months back. It was impressed with very nice graphics and great touch controls, and it played surprisingly smooth. A few days back, Ubisoft launched their game for Windows Phone for a rather whopping price of $4.49 and no trial.

Let’s dive in and find out if it’s worth the money.

You get to play the pirate Alonzo Batalla, a buccaneer who has to face the great Le Buse, the leader of the world’s most feared pirate crew. He entered your ship and found you in your cabin. Instead of just killing you, what would have certainly be expected from a pirate-like Le Buse, he is impressed by your behavior, gives you a tiny ship, and welcomes you in his crew.

Those who’ve been following the long series of Assassin’s Creed games will somehow feel familiar with the latest offspring, as it turns out to be Black Flag’s little brother. Unfortunately, it sets its focus on cruising the sea alone. No cities to explore, no running around, no jumping, no man-on-man fights. While Pirates is still a decent title to waste some time with on the go, you’re sooner or later going to miss those aspects used to make the Assassin’s Creed games the success they are.

The Plot

The story is told in static cut scenes, where the characters have short conversations presented in comic style. You would probably expect voiced dialogues, but unfortunately, all you get to see are text boxes. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it at least enables the player to skip passages of what never turns out to become a deep and exciting story.

The Tech

The graphics are very well done. Be it the animations of the sea, or the comical characters, or the way you navigate your ship. Background music and voices commenting on your fights are equally nice and add a lot to the atmosphere. I found myself remembered great pirate movies now and then.

Controls can be chosen between touch and tilt. As I tend to suck with tilt controls, I preferred to use touch, which is rather easy and works precisely. Not to mention that it’s feeling closer actually to maneuver the ship than it does with tilt controls. The only thing you really need to do from time to time is adjusting the camera angle to prevent your ship from hitting rocks or other obstacles.

The Good and the Bad

Now that we’ve got graphics, sound, and the game’s so-called story and background out of the way, let’s talk about the actual gameplay. The game has a map, offering different regions to discover, which are unlocked by achieving several main goals throughout the game.

Each region has not only the main quests to perform but also side quests, which give you gold, experience points, books – required to upgrade abilities your crew members provide – wood – required to upgrade your ship – and last not least supplies, which you need to travel from region to region. Main and side quests are marked with an icon on the region’s map but are also visible when cruising around.

It’s in your hands if you prefer drawing the route to follow directly on the map or really navigate your ship to its destination. The tasks you find yourself faced with a range from seizing better ships, destroying ships and salvage their loot, trying to reach waypoints in under a certain time, go to a certain spot, destroy the enemy’s ship(s) there, salvage their loot and bring it back to collect your rewards.

Most of the time, it’s just about fighting ships. These fights are rather boring after a while, simply due to how these fights occur. Fights are separated into offense and defense. Offense turns to mean that you need to aim with your weapons, which differs depending on your weapons. These are determined by 1) your ship and 2) its crew. Defence turns to appear in two different ways:

Dodge the enemy’s projectiles by either moving forth or back in a ridiculous way or
Tap and slice all sorts of projectiles in a Fruit Ninja kind of way.
Both attack and defense aren’t too challenging. You could easily win a fight blindfolded.

What’s nice, though, is the fact that you can upgrade the abilities provided by your crew, such as night vision, fog vision, faster reloading time of weapons, and such, and also upgrade your ship, which results in it being faster and have better armor for example. The ultimate goal is getting the next better ship, though. Each one is bigger and stronger than its predecessor.
Even though quests sound different, they all play pretty much alike.

Conclusion.

BUT. Even though the game certainly has its shortcomings, it’s still a decent, entertaining game. Definitely, nothing you’d be playing a long time at once, but nice enough to spend some minutes now and then. Worth the $4.49? I tend to say no, even – or especially – IF you’re a fan of the series. I recommend you to wait until the game gets promoted in the Red Stripe Deals or similar.

It’s currently only available for Windows Phone 8.0 devices. It has been pulled for 8.1. No matter if it’s the official one or 8.1 DP or 8.1 GDR 1 DP. I think it’ll return once a fix is in place.