A Bit of a Puzzle for Beginners, but Plenty of Pirate to Go Around

By Siam Choudhury | July 30, 2007 | | Filed under: Features, Reviews

A review of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates by Brook Willeford

Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates (just Puzzle Pirates from here on out) is an entertaining series of casual games tied together by a loose pirate milieu. Each of the games represents a particular piratical job like pumping out the bilges, trimming the sails, and the like. Several players at once can combine efforts to run a ship, or a single player can run with a crew of computer-controlled NPCs. Each job assists in the ship’s progress in some manner—trimming the sails allows the ship to go faster, carpentry repairs damage inflicted by enemy action, and loading the cannons allows the ship to fire broadsides more quickly.

When you get tired of working on ship, you can go ashore and brawl, swordfight, or play drinking and parlor games. In the early stages of the game, the only real purpose of these jobs is to increase your rating in each and to earn Pieces of Eight, which are the coin of the realm. Later on in your nautical career, a player can cast their lot with a scurvy crew and sail the seas looking for prizes. This is when the jobs become critical; as the ship needs every edge it can get against its opponents.

However, this divide between new players earning coin and more experienced players contributing to a crew is one of the few major problems of the game. In an ever-widening MMO market, getting new players involved with the persistent world that differentiates MMOs from single-player—or even most multi-player—games as soon as possible is critical, and Puzzle Pirates fails to do so. While the tutorials for most of the games are put together well enough, and the earlygames themselves are easy to pick up, there is no in-game explanation as to how to get signed on to a crew or exactly why you’re completing all these puzzles and gathering up Pieces of Eight. Additionally, players can easily take on one of the more advanced jobs before a tutorial has been offered for it.

Intro-level problems aside, most of the various games are incredibly entertaining, as they should be, given that they’re drawn from popular casual games (bilge pumping is essentially Bejeweled, rumbling is Bust-A-Move/Snood with a few tweaks, and sword fighting is Puzzle Fighter II Turbo with a new skin, for instance). It would be quite easy to simply wander around the world playing these games for hours on end without ever once interacting with another player. While this may be fun, however, it doesn’t utilize the key benefit of the MMO genre, the fact that the game is played in a persistent world populated by characters controlled by other players around the world.

As your pirate earns Pieces of Eight, different clothing options, pets, swords, and even ships and shops will become available. Most of the purchasable items have no game effect, but as you might expect, new swords give you a bonus to the sword-fighting game (one of the most important ones, as it allows you to loot a ship once you’ve run it down). Shops allow you to create items to sell to other players, actually contributing to and driving the game economy, which is exceptionally cool, and one very rarely implemented in other MMOs. Ships, of course, allow you to gather your own scurvy crew and scour the seas for ripe prizes. Unfortunately, only one crew member can be captain, and all the others have to just be crew, stuck pumping bilges, repairing holes in the hull, or setting sails, and there-in lies another problem with Puzzle Pirates. Just about every pirate worth his or her salt is going to want to captain his or her own ship, and so most crew members are just biding time until they can afford a ship of their own, meaning that there’s usually a lack of permanency to a crew roster.

Despite the difficulty in getting new players involved with the world at large, those who are already playing are usually extremely friendly, and quite enthusiastic. Pirate-ese is the order of the day here, with players greeting one another with “Yar” and “Ahoy” instead of the usual “kk gg gtg” leet-speak that drives most gamers over the age of 14 crazy. I’ve heard stories of crews who stick together through thick and thin and become scourges of the seas, well-oiled machines unmatched by fellow player or AI. There are other players out there, and they’re interacting with each other, however little it may look like it at first.

Just like most MMOs, you have to pay to play, but unlike most of them, you only have to pay to use some of the features. So long as you’re happy being a bilge rat and swabbing the decks (not literally, they don’t have a game for that yet), you can play for free; the basic games are entirely free and each day there is a selection of land-lubberly pursuits (fighting, drinking games, parlor games) available to play for free. If you want to captain your own ship, run your own shop, or play any game whenever you want, however, you have to pony up with the hard currency. Several servers (oceans, in Puzzle Pirate parlance) run on a subscription-based system, where you pay a regular fee for unlimited access to any of the for-pay features. The other oceans are on a micro-payment scale, which many MMOs seem to be implementing recently, where you only pay real-life money when you actually want to use a for-pay feature.

The art and music are a little cheesy, with your pirate and everyone else in the world looking like slightly-smoothed Lego people and most song loops seeming pretty short, but they definitely fit the feel of the game, which is light, cartoony, and fun. All in all, I think that as one of the first casual MMOs on the market, Puzzle Pirates has a lot to offer the Gaming industry in general and the MMO niche in particular, but I do think there is definitely some room for improvement, especially in new player immersion and effective use of the persistent game world.

Rating: 4 out of 5. Good clean fun, but not as elegant or newbie-friendly as it could have been.