Broadside

One of my favorite gaming movies is The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. The movie revolves around five gamers and their attempt to finally complete a Dungeons & Dragons module written by Dungeon Master. Toward the end, two of the characters are playing a game involving ninjas and pirates, and when asked about the pirates, one of the characters responds, “Everything’s better with pirates.” Today I’m going to see if that statement holds true by taking a look at a game in which you play as a pirate.

When the game begins, you’ll create a profile, if you haven’t already, then choose your stage (from a choice of three), your ship (you only have one unlocked at the start), your character (choice of two), then off you go. The goal of a map is to…well, there really isn’t a set goal, meaning there’s not one particular task to complete to end the stage. Each stage will have you shooting down some statues to improve certain abilities for your pirate and ship, plus there are other ships to take down: merchants, treasure ships, navy ships, and pirate hunters, each one acting differently towards you.

The merchant ships are the most neutral, so to speak. They won’t do anything unless you fire upon them, and they won’t chase you down if you just move along. Treasure ships will flee when they see you and are usually escorted by another ship, but sinking treasure ships will unlock new characters for you to play. Pirate hunters will begin to appear and hunt you down as you gain infamy, which is gained by sinking other ships. They can be tricky to take down, but sinking them will lead to gaining new ships to use at the start of a game. Finally, the navy ships will just try to take you down, no matter what. You can try to run from them, but they tend to have much better ships than you, so running isn’t really the best option.

You can move your ship by using sails and oars. If you’re moving in a direction where the wind can’t really hit your sails, bring out the oars to get some more speed. With your oars out, however, you can’t fire the cannons on your ship, so it’s kind of a trade-off. Each ship can fire cannons from both the left and right sides, as well as fire a grappling hook, and drop anchor. The grappling hook is used to grapple onto another ship, pulling it towards you so you can board it and potentially take it over. My only real problem with this part of the game was that once I figured out the best way to make my ship move, getting to my destination was kind of boring, as I just sat there and watched my ship move around the map.

I’ll get to the aspects of boarding and taking over ships in a moment, but I want to linger on ship-to-ship combat. Navigation of the ship uses WASD controls, while Q fires out the left side of the ship, and E the right side. This makes sense when you think about it, but it can also be very disorienting if you’re going south and try to fire upon another ship only to accidentally fire out of the wrong side. It can also be tricky to line up your shots when the other ships keep turning out your cannon’s line of fire.  It also doesn’t help that your cannons take a few moments to reload, so you can’t just rapid fire on a ship.

So what happens when you’re ship is taking so much damage it’s about to sink? Or maybe the opposition just has a better ship than yours (and considering what you start with, that’s a definite possibility). You can always board the other ship. This, though, is easier said than done and is probably my biggest complaint.  You can use a grappling hook to latch onto the other ship, but you kind of have to lead the other ship, by firing where you think it’ll go. Even then, it seemed like I could rarely latch onto it, and if you miss you have to hold the right mouse button to reel the hook back in, which takes a few moments, all while the other ship is still firing on you. Provided you successfully hook onto the other ship, though, it’s time to board it and take it over.

Taking over a ship isn’t all that hard, for the most part. There are plenty of pirates to fight, depending on which ship you board, but the main goal is to defeat the captain. Doing that will allow you to take control of the wheel—and the ship is yours. Or you can go back to your own ship and sink the enemy ship into the sea.

The graphics and animation just feel kind of so-so and don’t really stand out to me, at least while on the ship (I do like the graphics and design while you’re sailing the high seas, though). How combat works, however, isn’t all that bad. The other pirates will have lightning bolts appear above their heads to indicate what attacks they’re going to use, if you can parry them, or if you have to dodge them. As long as you’re not surrounded or backed into a corner, it’s relatively easy to avoid attacks and defeat every pirate on the ship. Plus if you start to get too heavily damaged, you can always drink some rum to regain some health, though if you’re in a pinch you’ll likely lose that health almost immediately.

When it comes to Broadside there are some things to like about it, but some things that could be improved upon. On the positives, as stated earlier, the graphics and animations while sailing look nice, and the idea of ship-to-ship combat makes a lot of sense because, you know, you’re a pirate and all. I also like the mechanics of hand-to-hand combat and how you can only parry certain attacks but have to dodge others. That being said, the ship-to-ship combat could use improvement, as I only sank a couple of ships due to having to be pretty precise with your attacks. Most of the time I just said, “The heck with this,” and boarded the ship…provided I could actually latch onto the other ship. As much as I like the on-board combat mechanics, the combat itself seems too easy at times, as I only game overed once or twice while in combat on a ship.

As I was playing, I noticed that there isn’t really much of a goal. Well, sort of. Once you get a game over, you’ll see a screen that shows your stats as well as the number of ships you sank. In one of my runs, it looked like I sank 10 out of a possible 14 or so (well, the stats said I sank 10 ships, but the icons showed I only had 3 of 14 left, so go figure). Thankfully you can always continue your game from the last ship you sank, which is nice to get in a few quick spurts here and there, but has a bit of a drawback that I noticed. I restarted one of my games from the last ship I sank, but was still under attack from two other ships. I’m not sure if the game just got stuck loading the map, but I could hear the combat in the background, and when the stage finally loaded, I was already sunk. I would assume that clearing out a certain number of ships would clear the map, but I kept getting double-teamed and didn’t get the change to find out. I’ll add onto this in the comments section below if that ever happens.

In the end, Broadside is a nice game in concept, and parts of it are good, but overall it could use improvement. The fact that the full price of the game is $15 is also a little off-putting, as this doesn’t feel like a game I’d pay that much for. I know that $15 isn’t all that much, but given the range of other games for the same price makes it harder for me to pick up for that much. If the animations were improved a bit during shipboard combat, and if some of the ship-to-ship combat mechanics were fixed (namely the grappling hook), that would make $15 a lot more tempting. As it stands now, with three maps and some ships and characters to unlock, it’s not bad, but not great either.