Review: Pirate's Treasure - Pirate Themed Dual Stick Shooter
by Staff Writer
June 10, 2010
Overview
Avast ye mateys, there be gold in this thar app. Pirate’s Treasure is the newest dual stick shooter to grace the App Store, and this one provides a pirate theme. That’s not all as the game presents levels in a full on campaign mode set up like a platformer. You literally face death since the grim reaper has stolen your gold, and now you need to battle through waves of bugs, magical creatures, and the undead.
Features
This dual stick shooter actually has a campaign mode presenting you with 50 levels. Some levels have multiple quests that present you with keys, and you need a certain amount of keys to unlock new levels, a mechanic similar to Mario games. There are multiple types of quests including killing a specific number of enemies, collecting a certain number of gold coins, or lasting for a specific period of time. There are minor RPG elements as you can visit the shop to purchase upgrades to your musket, your speed, your luck, and even buy a special ability. The special ability turns you into a big octopus to smash through enemies, like bull mode in Minigore. Crystal is included for achievements as well as a high score table for the one survival level included.
The Good
The best aspect of Pirate's Treasure is the deluxe campaign mode to give you more than just a simple survival shooter like so many other dual stick shooters. The game gives you varying objectives from level to level so it's not always the same thing. Sometimes it's killing z certain number of enemies, or collecting a specific number of coins. There are seven different environments with varying types of enemies per environment. Each environment has a number of levels with each one giving out keys that you collect like stars in a Mario game. On top of that each environment has a boss battle with one final concluding one that still opens it up for a sequel.
The game progresses in difficulty nicely to have rather slow moving enemies that pick up in speed and toughness from environment to environment. As you collect coins you can use them to upgrade your character to be able to handle the more difficult levels. There are a number of power ups including turning into a sea monster to really wreck havoc.
The game is definitely nicely designed with the 3D engine giving shape to your pirates as well as all the different enemies. The action in the foreground of splattering enemies as well as the background environments definitely are nice to see. The game features varying soundtracks that fit with a swashbuckling theme with a different one per environment.
The main pirate character also has a number of sayings that don't feel too repetitive. If having a deluxe campaign wasn't enough of just collecting keys, there are a number of achievements to collect in Crystal as well as online high scores.
The Bad
Though there is some variation the game melds together from level to level as it's always just a rectangles area of a survival mode. You run around blasting enemies for as long as you can in a similar set up to Minigore, but with a smaller scale. The new levels just change the skin on the same small space there is. The game has a campaign, but it's not open world, and rather just splits up the survival shooter into mini quests. The game also lacks the frantic hectic nature of a game like Minigore as there is never an overload of enemies on screen. It's rather slow moving for most of the game so it's more boring than challenging.
Once you reach the higher levels it feels like a chore rather than an enjoyable experience to complete these quests. You will mindlessly go around killing enemies never once feeling threatened with death which takes most of the fun out of the game. There is definitely a lot to do, but not many players will want to go through the monotony.
