Corsair Cove is a city-building game based on the life of intrepid pirates rebuilding their lives after The Crown and pirate hunters have put a stop to their swashbuckling and plundering. I expected this premise to end as soon as the game started, but it seems there’s a story built into milestone events as you build your city. I love a good city-builder, but by adding a story—albeit a relatively uninspiring story—events and stakes take on new meaning, and it clearly inspired creative opportunities. Corsair Cove is an example of how a good premise can juice an entire game.
Everything is pirate themed. You build tents, taverns, woodcutting buildings, warehouses, piers, ships, and moonshine still’s. And you build them in all sorts of odd places. Place buildings on cliffsides, on a beach, in a jungle, over the water, against a rock, and on and on. Pirates are ingenuous, they don’t play by the rules, and neither does their engineering. All the professional city builders have their work cut out for them. There are no roundabouts to abuse; you have bridges and cliff paths. Connecting them can be frustrating. If you build something on a cliffside, connecting them downwards could be problematic. It depends on what the camera and the geometry want to do.
City builders tend to ignore the people that inhabit them, but the pirates have a sim-like quality to that’s as fascinating as watching a line of ants coordinate their movements. You’ll see some carrying four times their weight, you’ll see them drunk and dancing with pigs, you’ll find them working hard in their zones. Watching the humans inhabit their city isn’t a consistent part of city builders, but it’s always better when it is. The sound effects enhance this effect. The way the pirates scream in rage while Outrage is triggered feels like a mutiny, and the voice actors do a great job of mimicking the familiar pirate accent.
Some would like to see real-time combat in this game, I don’t think that’s feasible or necessary. That’s a lot of game to build within a city-builder. It would be cool to see your turn-based choices play out in 3D scripted combat, but what you get is a dice-rolling cannon fight that also works well. The rest is left to your imagination. You can see what attacks your enemy will do and act accordingly—attack or defend. Everything you do uses supplies, so you have to manage that while taking down your opponent. Whatever you choose to do, the dice determines how effective it is. It’s not as grandiose as a pirate battle you’ll find in Windrose, but it’s an appropriate and fun solution for a city-building game. You have to manage something, you have choice, and there’s some randomness.
And I must note: Corsair Cove is a beautiful game, too.