14 DAY TRIAL // Pirates are always a fun subject, but unfortunately, there aren't enough good pirate games out there. Some people are trying to change this with Seaworthy.
Granted, there aren't enough good pirate films either, aside from the mildly amusing family-friendly "Pirates of the Caribbean."
Anyway, developer Mildly Competent Games is currently running a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, with the aim to secure funding for Seaworthy, a sort of FTL for those who would rather die at the hands of other people instead of space amoebas.
The game is a real-time strategy title that features pixelated pirates and seems pretty brutal at first sight, so it's already looking promising.
The developers tout their creation as a mixture of FTL and Sid Meier's Pirates, where you issue commands to your crew, take part in naval battles, recruit new crewmen and hop aboard enemy ships for plundering.
The game blends ship-to-ship combat sequences to decision making based on random events, and seems to have a pretty well-defined rhythm, where you do some battling, get some rewards, repair and upgrade your ship, and then hop into another fight.
FTL plus rum equals win
These kinds of games usually tend to live or die on the time of emergent gameplay that arises from the combination of randomness and strategy, and it seems that soon we'll have to invent an FTL-like genre.
In any case, the single-player game will enable players to seek glory and adventure while avoiding the many dangers of the procedurally generated world, and enjoying many humorous pixelated animations and the most pixelated wooden legs in a game ever.
Seaworthy's release schedule points to an alpha build coming before the end of the year, set to land on Steam Early Access soon after that.
The developers note that they plan on releasing the game on Early Access as a beta, which means mostly stable and feature complete. Hopefully, there will also be some mad keelhauling action.