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# Corsair Cove's Pirates Get In The Way Of A Good Time
- URL: https://aftermath.site/corsair-cove-impressions-review/
- Published: 2026-08-04T22:40:55.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-04T22:40:55.000Z
- Description: Tired: building out. Wired: building up.
- Author: Luke Plunkett
- Tags: Impressions, Video Games, corsair cove, city-builder, pc, hooded horse

Because[ I am duty-bound to play every single city-builder that crosses my desk](https://aftermath.site/game-of-the-year-2025-aftermath-luke-plunkett/), I've spent the last week or so with *Corsair Cove*, a pirate-themed game from Hooded Horse. I have mixed thoughts.

As a pirate game, I don't like it. This is a city-builder with a very specific design in mind--namely following the *Frostpunk* blueprint of adding quests and decisions atop the building of cities--and with pirates (or at least the pirates written for this game) it's just a really awkward fit.

There's all this writing and story and impetus for the player to set the city-building aside every few minutes and do all this *other stuff*, and I found nearly all of it to be an intrusive bore. The characters and writing are deeply annoying, and the quests you're sent out on are resolved with a basic and quickly repetitive card+dice system.

The more games try to cram this kind of experience into a city-builder, the more tired I'm getting of it; I think it worked in [*Frostpunk*](https://aftermath.site/frostpunk-2-impressions/)because the narrative was built so coherently around it (and because it was generally very well-written and thought through), but with games that aren't able to pull it off (like this one), the quests just get in the way of the thing you're *actually* here to play.

And in this case, that thing is *great*. The city-building aspect of this city-builder is one of the most unique I've played in a long time, because instead of giving you a grassy plain and asking you to build outwards, it gives you islands full of precarious rocks and mountains and asks you to build *up*. Look at this!

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/30/f5/30f5b1bb-84ee-4c26-b446-fb9a5e512994/content/images/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-30-115033.png)

That is *so cool*. Nearly everything you can build in this game can be stuck to the side of a mountain, then linked together with precarious cliff pathways and rope bridges. It means that once you get the hang of the game and need to start worrying about your resource chains--*Corsair Cove* will track where every piece of timber and rum is coming from and going to, and make sure pirates aren't having to walk too far to deliver them--the flexibility you have is fantastic, because you can optimise your routes horizontally *and* vertically.

It's just so much fun stringing all that together! *Corsair Cove* isn't pedantic about your placement *at all*; you can just slap stuff to any rock it'll fit on, you can rope everything together and it all works, in ways that are extremely satisfying to just *play with*. Buildings 'snap' to the rocks, and[ as a lover of Little Guys](https://aftermath.site/strategy-game-turn-based-tactics-movement/), the way the pirates are continuously moving and working and partying all across your city is a joy to just sit back and watch.

Yeah, there's a complex and rewarding city-builder here, if you are serious about this genre and want to truly optimise every inch of resource collection and item delivery. But I enjoyed *Corsair Cove* mostly as something to *play with*, a construction set full of sick precarious shanty suburbs and Little Guys doing funny stuff.

I think that might be why I'm so down on the story and quests. Every time they pop up (or are necessitated to unlock things) it feels like an intrusion, a forced diversion from the stuff I *really* want to be doing here: sticking a pub to the side of a mountain, building an intricate little supply network for it then watching some bald pirates dance a little jig.