Urban Pirate Review

Sometimes, we play as deep emotional characters with a well-thought out backstory who we can truly relate to. Other times, we find ourselves embodying awful stereotypes that do little to excite us. Urban Pirate is an example of the latter: the titular pirate is actually a homeless person who relies on stealing food, smoking weed and scrounging.

The story, as I gathered from the unrepeatable opening cutscene, involves some kind of dystopia that the main character chooses to leave and be homeless. The premise feels like a joke, but personally I never saw the punchline and the mechanics of the game didn’t really do much to sway me. There is a little more story to be told throughout the different missions in the form of short cutscenes, but these only served to explain why the random events were skewed.

Urban Pirate is a management game: the player is tasked with maintaining hunger, sanity and money and survive for a set number of days. If hunger or sanity drop to zero, you lose. To raise hunger is simple enough - just eat something, though you can only hold three items of food at first. This is upgraded to four pretty quickly, but that can still be very frustrating. Raising sanity is achieved by either spending time with people in a squat or smoking weed. Smoking weed reduces your hunger though, presumably as a tie to the “munchies”.

The street layout makes no difference on where you can walk

The hovel itself is also your easiest way of earning money: you can spend a turn working in the bar which will earn you between $10 and $50 and might increase your sanity. This would clearly be the best thing to do if you could spend money to buy food, but you can’t since this game is horribly stereotyped. The only thing you can spend money on is weed, so you’re forced to steal.

Stealing has a chance - an increasing chance at that - of failing and causing you to either be captured or be forced to escape in a rather crappy runner game. You can move left or right from the top of the screen avoiding obstacles that are randomly placed and are often impossible to avoid. I think I succeeded in escaping once in ten attempts, and most of my failures were because the character couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the un-jumpable fences of randomly placed homes.

The game takes place in a pixel city, which your giant character can run around - mostly. There are some strange collision points that don’t feel consistent with the rest of the map: Why can I walk over that building but not this mail box? These inconsistencies are amplified once the police start patrolling one of the main pathways I had become accustomed to using. The police will stop you if you collide with them - another inconsistent collision, I must add, since half the time I have no idea why I’m being arrested. Being stopped will skip the game to the next day, so if you have one hunger or sanity that’s game over.

This is more about luck than skill

If you get caught stealing, you can be fined and warned the first time, and arrested the second. If you get caught holding weed, you can be fined and warned the first time, and arrested the second. The fines are outrageous bearing in mind there’s only one inconsistent way of earning money, though fortunately you don’t have to pay straight away. If you don’t pay, you’ll lose five days off of your goal, and you’ll come out of prison with low sanity, no weed and no energy to actually do anything but skip to the next day.

That’s just my problems with the gameplay; technically this game is a mess. There’s only one resolution, and it’s 640x480. There is no mouse control. The keys used - in their entirety - are the arrow keys, F1-5, number keys 1-2, enter, spacebar, E and S. You can at least turn the sound on or off, and change between fullscreen and windowed with a press of a button. You can’t quit the game while in fullscreen mode without tabbing out and closing it from the taskbar, though.

There is an RPG element, but it costs a currency - StreetCred - that you’ll need to grind for and doesn’t really give you anything useful that I have seen. Each mission has a bonus mission unlocked after completing it which has an additional requirement on top of the original mission that gives you additional StreetCred, but the requirements seemed very reliant on good fortune for me to want to chase them.

It was cold that Tuesday night...

I’ve used the word inconsistent throughout this review, and that’s what Urban Pirate is to me: there’s a good foundation let down by inconsistent design and tech choices. There’s more frustration here than fun, and I feel especially let down by the complete absence of real pirates, with the main character more resembling a ninja. The soundtrack is good for about twenty minutes before becoming repetitive and obnoxious and the controls are mismatched and unintuitive.