I must admit, I have got too defensive and comfortable in my own little corner recently. It’s true, to be able to spend a whole afternoon in a completely different world than the one I live in is refreshing. On top of that, socialising and small talking with colleagues or whomever that I don’t quite care about is tiring, so single-players that eliminate that threat for me is frankly somewhere I will always prefer to escape to.
Truthfully, people are difficult. Sometimes even your closests friends can be having a bad day and put some of that extra weight on you, the more you grow up the more often it happens. That’s why games are more preferable: it’s not that it is really better than a carefully maintained and invested friendship, sometimes it is simply safer because you always know what you expect, a great time.
I do miss a good time with my friends, even after saying all of that. And luckily, I found the cure in the same box where I found my distractions: you see, all I needed was a medium, something else to direct our attention so instead of focusing on the boring or frastrating work, we could focus on killing one another, humiliating each other and celebrate in the most revelling manner. Dirty Dirty Pirate is a game that did exactly that for me.
The Beauty of “Not Having”
Sorry for the readers here that had to go through all of that to get to the actual review of the game, but in my defense, there is really not that much to talk about the game itself. There is no background story, no plot and not even a character selection page in Dirty Dirty Pirates: you go with whichever ugly bastard you are assigned to. I am aware of how party games are notoriously knwon to be staright forward, and Dirty Dirty Pirates is still in my experience one of the most “simple games”.
That’s not all there is to the simplicity of the game: the UI is extremly clean and simple, the art style is simple, even the game modes are simple, it is either fight to death or try to puke on each other before the clock runs out. Yet, that is not at all a critique on this game but really one of it’s major attraction. Unlike the era where laptops could only carry 64 mb or even less, we live in a generation where there are powerful machines, and consequently games have been getting ridiculously greedy and compound. That is not a bad thing, until you need an afternoon where you don’t care about the deep battle mechanismsm, replaybablity, the worthiness of a platnium trophy or the plot and all you need is just enjoy the game with your friends.
The developers of Dirty Dirty Pirates caught onto this almost instinctivly and precisely: you do not need to spend fifteen minutes for everyone at the party understand the controls or another half an hour to explain all the characters so they can make an educated selection, nor will you need to wait for the dice to roll for several times where everyone’s concentration has been wasted only to finally start a group game where everyone can participate but there are so many of them and this one happens to be so niche and oblique so you have to sit down and learn the rules again: in Dirty Pirates, all you needed to do is fight, fight and fight. Oh and on top of that, have a great time with your friends, obviously.
Just The Right Amount of Chaos
Remember how neat I said Dirty Dirty Pirates was? Well the gameplay is everything but. In the classic mode of dirty pirate, all you do is pick up a weapon from one of the chests that periodically drops from the sky, and use it to skewwer your opponents. Simpel enough it sounds a little boring, right? It all changes with just a little clever map design that characters and weapons thrown that leaves from one side of the map will enter directly from the opposite side, the game accelerates and becomes absolutely out of control once everyone starts throwing weapons. Overly confident gamers who assumed to master this game at the start will soon face the challenge.
Just try to imagine it, you have four pirates that dress differently but doesn’t really look that much apart running around a tiny map like headless chickens throwing weapons at each other while in the mean time the spear they threw in the last round might still be flying the air relentlessly trying to find a poor victim, still, you can’t give up, instead you dodge all the flying weapons coming towards you from every direction just so you can go pick up another weapon at the corner of the map and add to the chaos, and besides all of this is happening your friends are also all shouting either because they have been killed by the weapon they threw themselves or have killed someone else in a humiliating way. Let’s just say the Battlefield series were not much more chaotic.
Chaos is a double edge sword. Too much and your attention is consumed at a very fast pace, you start to lose interets even faster when you realize the game is just a over-glorified Random Number Generator. While no one can really say what is the “right amount of chaos”, Dirty Dirty Pirate is definitely more than a mere RNG. Alongside chaos it offers some calculations and strategy to be present in the game which is surprisingly important. For example the classic trick of hitting your opponent in the back with a spear that is thrown towards the opposite side requires a decent amount of calculation and luck, so when you pull it off the feeling of accomplishment will not only encourgae you to laugh harder but play harder.
On top of that, the over-the-top hit animation, the stupid “duck” button which is only useful in the pleague mode but you will from time to time accidently click onto it when you try to dodge and it always looks funny all add a sense of stupid-fun to the game which reminds you the real purpose of this all: to have fun.
Conclusion
So overall Dirty Dirty Pirates is a pretty solid game. However, the base line is that you are only buying & playing this game with your friends. Because that is essentially what this game is: a digital, cyber uno (but with so much more blood and action). That means you can not play this game alone (like there is not even the option to let cpu control the other characters in case you want to try it in your own time) and there is not that much progress you can make in this game like the other games in terms of practicing to become better, you open this game to bond with your friends and you leave it on the bench whenever you are alone.
With that being said, for both single-player lovers and gamers that have only been enjoying heavily competetive ONG with their friends, Dirty Dirty Pirates is still a really nice change in pace. Like I said, it is easy, chaotic and fun, and that is a rare combination to find these days. I hope everyone can have a great time with their friends playing this game, and even if it’s just for a split second, find that careless laughter you lot use to share as kids.
