Pirate Bloopers

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Pirate Bloopers is a family-friendly Arcade-style game released on Xbox One in 2023 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024. In this game, players try to collect treasure while avoiding and taking down increasingly difficult enemy ships.

The presentation here is decent, using simple, colorful 3D visuals to represent the ships and floating land masses. There’s nothing impressive here, but it works well enough for the game. This is backed by a subdued jazzy theme that doesn’t really fit the rest of the game, but I suppose it doesn’t detract too much either.

As for the gameplay, the main idea behind this game is that you’re sailing a ship around an area of the sea littered with treasure and enemies, and you’re trying to pick up as much treasure as you can while either evading or taking out said enemies. The game is segmented into waves, and after each wave you’ll get the opportunity to spend your treasure to upgrade your health, attack power, attack frequency, your speed, and your number of lives. Then it’s off to the next waves, which will be filled with enemies greater in number and harder in difficulty.

It’s an enjoyable game loop, but it’s ruined by a few problems. First, your boat controls like a, well, boat, which means it’s sluggish to respond to your movements. This would be all well and good if you could counteract this issue with upgrades, but no matter how much you upgrade speed, you can’t change just how severe the game’s inertia is, and how long it takes to course-correct.

Even worse than that is how slowly you can turn your ship. While computer-controlled enemy ships can seemingly spin on a dime to face you, you have no such luxury, only slowly turning around to face a new direction. Sadly, this is not an ability you’ll ever be able to upgrade, meaning that whenever a ship shows up behind you, you’ll always have to sloooooowly turn to face it if you want to take it out with your own attacks.

Speaking of attacks, while you can upgrade your power and shot frequency, you’re never given the ability to change your attack type or to improve the amount of time it takes to charge up a shot. Yes, you get to fire more often, but what does that even matter when firing that often only works if your enemy is at point blank range?

Also, I’ve got to mention it – this is a game that feels like it could be improved with multiplayer, but doesn’t have multiplayer.

In the end, while I enjoy the sort of simple Arcade-style “see how far you can get” gameplay that’s present in Pirate Bloopers, the limited choices for upgrades and the control issues make this a game where your losses often feel due to problems out of your control, leading to frustration rather than a desire to dive back into the game. In the end, while there’s some enjoyment to be had here, I cannot recommend this game.

tl;dr – Pirate Bloopers is a family-friendly Arcade-style game where players collect treasure to upgrade their ship while taking out or evading enemy ships. Unfortunately, the simple fun of the game is undermined by some frustrating control issues a lack of variety in upgrades the game offers you, and the absence of multiplayer. There’s still some fun to be found here, but it’s nestled among far too much frustration.

Grade: C

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