Because I am duty-bound to play every single city-builder that crosses my desk, 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 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!
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, 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.
