Plunderer’s Adventures’ perky pixel pirates

Pixel art, pirates and tower defence should be a winning combination, but unfortunately Plunderer’s Adventures, the latest game from the prolific porters at eastasiasoft and developer H Room, comes up rather short in most regards… save for its sprite art, which is, at least, quite nice.

I’m all for more adult games being ported to console platforms — and with Plunderer’s Adventures’ full title Plunderer’s Adventures: Sea of Whores, as it was known on its original PC release, the intent should be pretty clear — but I think this game highlights that there needs to be a certain amount of quality control in place when considering what 18+ games are worth getting a wider release, lest we end up with the eShop looking even more like Steam’s shovelware-saturated storefront than it does already.

So I don’t like Plunderer’s Adventures much, that much should be clear — but as with anything like this, there’s always a chance that someone somewhere might get something out of this, so let’s take a look at what it actually offers.

Plunderer's Adventures

In Plunderer’s Adventures, you initially take on the role of a pirate captain called Riley, who is trying to assemble a crew to go in pursuit of the famous Flying Dutchman pirate ship. In order to do this, she needs to attack a series of other ships — or, more accurately, she’ll need to wait for the crews of said ships to try and board her vessel, then beat them back with a combination of her own sharpshooting and some special skills.

Plunderer’s Adventures is a lane-based defence game in which you can move Riley (and later her sister Annie) up and down across several distinct lanes and fire at incoming enemies. There are two main enemy types per level — generally one is faster but weaker, while the other takes more hits. In order to clear a level, you need to clear a set number of enemy waves, with each successive stage having more waves to challenge before you can claim victory.

If an enemy gets past you, they carry off one of your crew members — or rather, one of the several clones of a single crew member that are inexplicably standing behind Annie or Riley and not helping out with the situation even a little bit. When this happens, you lose a life, and if you lose three lives, you lose the battle but get to keep any gold you earned.

Plunderer's Adventures

As each battle progresses, crates will randomly be tossed into the middle of the screen, and will contain an extra life, a power-up that doubles the coins you earn for a short period, or a broken heart that damages all enemies on screen. And in the second and third stage of each lead character’s story, Annie or Riley will earn a cooldown-based ability that you can trigger using the shoulder buttons.

It’s a solid enough foundation, if rather unremarkable — and distinctly lacking in scope, owing to having just five levels in each “story” — but where Plunderer’s Adventures really falls down is in its execution and balancing.

The first level is fine… ish. It’s slow and the pace at which the enemies appear makes it quite boring, but you will almost certainly beat it your first time without any difficulty. The trouble is, the second stage ramps up the difficulty — primarily through increasing the hit points of the incoming enemies — so considerably that it’s necessary to grind the first stage multiple times in order to earn enough money to upgrade your attack power. And when you do upgrade your attack power, the second stage becomes just as slow and boring as the first; there’s no in-between.

Plunderer's Adventures

This situation repeats for the third and fourth stages and will likely cause many players to tap out well before the grand finale, but it is worth noting that the final stage of each story is actually quite good, and more in line with the sort of pace and intensity I’d normally expect from a game like this. You’ll be confronted by all the previous enemies you encountered across the prior four stages, and they’ll come much more thick and fast, meaning you’ll need to prioritise your targets carefully and make good use of your skills. Trouble is, that’s just one stage — and it goes nowhere from there.

It doesn’t actually take that long to get to this point — you can beat the first “story” in half an hour or so, and roughly the same for the second — but it feels like a real slog to get there. Replaying levels that are initially way too hard and then much too easy is tedious — and until you purchase the skill cooldown and skill effectiveness upgrades, the skills are largely useless. Thankfully, they come into their own on the final stage if you have upgraded them — but by then it will be too little, too late for a lot of players.

To Plunderer’s Adventures’ credit, the two playable characters do each handle very differently: Riley is a musketeer and thus fires single shots at quite a slow rate, while Annie has a chargeable cannon that can increase its power if you hold down the fire button before shooting. They also both have unique skills, but only two each — and, as noted, they’re not all that useful until you’ve upgraded them once or twice. And by the time you get to that point you may well be bored of the game anyway, particularly with the complete uselessness of Riley and Annie’s crew members — why don’t they act as their own distinct type of “tower” to make things more interesting?

Plunderer's Adventures

The game opens with a prominent warning about 18+ content, nudity and all characters being over the age of 18, but during gameplay there’s really nothing lewd of note whatsoever; all the pixel-art gallery images you unlock for clearing each stage are mildly provocative rather than outright lewd, and to be honest I’d tapped out of the game’s abject tedium long before determining whether or not the console ports have the same “nude” versions of the gallery images upon completion as the PC version does.

On top of that, the script is poorly written and clearly hasn’t been given the most cursory of editing passes, the music on the menu screen sounds like it was composed by someone who’s never heard of the “Quantize” function in their digital audio workstation, and the whole experience feels like it was designed initially as a heavily monetised mobile game, then quickly retooled for PC and console release.

About the only thing the game has going for it, as noted in the introduction, is that the sprite art is all quite nice and well animated. But aside from that, this is absolutely not eastasiasoft’s finest hour — so with the greatest of respect, I will make the predictable joke that it’s probably not even worth “pirating” this one (DISCLAIMER FOR JOYLESS ARGUMENTATIVE EXTREMELY ONLINE TYPES WHO LIKE TO GO “GOTCHA”: you shouldn’t pirate shit anyway, it’s just a joke, bro), and that you should spend your time with the company’s much better output instead. Arrrr.

Plunderer’s Adventures is available now for Nintendo Switch. Thanks to eastasiasoft for the review code.

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Pete Davison
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