If I know anything about people that like collectable card roguelites like Slay the Spire it’s that they are a hungry maw and need to be fed constant content to be satiated. The good news for all these people is that Pirates Outlaws has arrived to temporarily gratify their frothing need to collect cards and engage in fights while making meta progression that unlocks new scenarios. The question is: what’s in there for people that aren’t deranged deck-builder fans?
The basic premise for Pirates Outlaws is that the player takes on the role of a pirate and given a deck of cards based on that class. The starting class is The Gunner, which does a good job of introducing the rules. There are attack cards, defense cards, and skill cards that will impact the flow of the game. To use most of these cards requires limited ammo that requires refilling with a resource card. Pirates Outlaws puts an interesting spin on this by differentiating between ranged and melee cards – ranged can target any enemy but cost ammo, melee doesn’t but can usually only hit an enemy at the front. Finding a balance (or not – more on that later) to the two attack cards is the key to success.
The game sets itself up in a way that will be familiar to veterans of this style of game. There is a map with multiple paths up towards each stage’s boss. Along the way there are fights, random events, upgrade stations and resupply/healing spots. Each movement costs action points, of a starting pool of 100, and if the player does not resupply the action points, they will start to lose health. It is a ‘small’ wrinkle that means the player must always be looking for the next resupply spot and plan their travels to hit them – taking suboptimal routes with less bonuses to keep the ship afloat.
A fair bit of dying will be done in trying to beat all three stages of the first area. The bosses each have their own pattern and special little tricks that can vaporise a health bar and just getting to them can be challenging. Fortunately, each run will unlock new cards to use, new trinkets that will provide contextual buffs, and there are 16 classes to mess around with which have their own set of characteristics to learn.
There is a lot of customisation to be done here, on one run I was playing as the The Collector. He gets a starting set of buffs and extra bonuses to pick from after each fight. Instead of doing anything with defenses, I focused on keeping my character in the drunk status. Whilst drunk my characters had a 50% chance of hitting for crit, or completely missing. To round that out I had a extra couple of trinkets that allowed me to heal with each critical hit and gain armour from playing cards. Every fight was me trying to maintain my character’s drunkenness so that I could heal him each round.
There are other characters who focus on being able to dodge attacks, another that gets bonuses from cursed cards, and one that has a bear buddy that provides them with a different rhythm entirely.
Alongside the first normal campaign, the game has advanced challenges, bounties to seek out on runs, quests to complete, and extra game modes to unlock; Pirates Outlaws is a game overflowing with content and complexity.
With that much content and variety between classes there isn’t a good explanation for all of it, and instead it is nestled in a glossary that is not easily accessible. I had played the game for about an hour before I figured out what Rage does, or what the Lucky/Unlucky dynamic for one class meant. This is going to be off-putting for newcomers that don’t have a lot of ingrained knowledge of this style of game.
Another stumbling block that I never fully appreciated in Pirates Outlaws was the way it forces the players to pick cards. In all other games of this type the player is given a choice of a number of cards at the end of each fight so as to bolster and personalise their deck, but there is always the option to just skip. In Pirates the player has to pick a card and this can lead to the decks being overly stacked. This lead to me feeling like sometimes the game odds were stacked against me. Not to mention there are a number of characters that rely on random percentages to win and I found myself with a good strategic deck that lost a lot of behind the scenes dice rolls that meant I could not win.
With that said, Pirates Outlaws has an overwhelming amount of content to see and anyone yearning for more of this type of material would do well to jump in.
For the neophytes of deck-building? I think they will find that bigger, in this case, is not better.
Conclusion
Pirates Outlaws is a solid deck-building roguelite that adds tons of content and lots of interesting spins on familiar formulas, it is an easy recommend for fans of the genre. For those that are new to this style – there are better places to start.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox Series S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
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