Arr Matey! It's Time To Recover Your Precious Swag From The Scallywags

Scallywags (Free) by Funday Factory is an arcade rail-shooter game that involves the lost swag of a walrus pirate and the mission of getting it back from the pesky scallywag thieves. If a walrus pirate doesn’t entice you to play the game, then perhaps the large amounts of explosives in the sea along the way will.

Let’s admit it — pirates are cool. I mean, they have an entire day dedicated to speaking like them, so that has to mean something, right? Anyway, regardless of what you really think of pirates, Scallywags is still an enjoyable game, especially if you just like to blow things up. Seriously, who doesn’t? I was intrigued with Scallywags when I first heard about it, so I was excited to give it a try.

The visuals in Scallywags are rendered in 3-D, and have that cartoonish look and feel to them, but I mean, what would you expect from a game with a walrus pirate? The graphics are still quite delightful, as they are lush, vivid, and pretty detailed for such a fun title. Animations are fairly smooth, and the adventurous soundtrack is sure to get you into the pirate-y mood — who knows, you may even start talking like a pirate as you play.

There are five different worlds in Scallywags for you to go through, with 21 levels and five unique bosses to face off against. In order to advance to the next stage, you will, of course, need to beat the previous one. You can earn up to three stars on these levels, and they will all have their own unique set of missions for players to complete. These missions will range from just a certain number of kills, or you will need to avoid something entirely. The more missions you complete, the more stars you will earn.

The gameplay is fairly straightforward, especially since this is an on-rails shooter. Each level will have various scallywags (the guys who stole your swag) pop up in front of you, and your job is to shoot them down while avoiding their shots at you.

In order to shoot them, just tap on your target, or swipe across them for multiple targets. When a scallywag is targeted, it’s obvious due to the bullseye that appears on them, so you just target them and move on to the next one — the shooting process is automatic. Some of the scallywags, including bosses, will be tougher than others, requiring multiple hits to take down. At the end of the level, you will find a treasure chest, which is just a small fraction of your total swag. Shoot it to collect the treasure inside. If you have power-up items available, just tap on them in your inventory (near the bottom of the screen) to activate them.

When enemies are defeated, they will drop coins that you can collect just by tapping on them, but you’ll have to be quick. They’ll be gone if they fall into the water. These coins (basically your swag) can be used in the shop for various ship upgrades, stronger cannons to lay waste to the scallywags, and other power-up items like nukes, duck bombs, slow downs, and more. If you are low on swag, you can always purchase more or get the Swag Doubler, increasing your swag collection rate by two.

I’m not usually a fan of on-rail shooters, as I feel that they end up feeling a bit too easy. While that may hold true with this game, I still found it to be quite an enjoyable experience. The cartoonish graphics, pirate theme, and simple controls make it a great little game to just kill some downtime with. My only complaint is the fact that the game seems to lag a bit when you come back to it from the multitasking switcher. Hopefully the developers optimize this a bit in future updates.

If you’re looking for a fun pirate themed arcade game this week, I recommend checking out Scallywags. You can get it for free on the App Store as a universal download.