Pirates PlundArrr (Wii)

Sometimes you just want to turn your brain off for a bit and revel in the mindless violence of a brawler. Beat ’em up games are often criticized for their repetitive design, but having a game where you can just whale away on tons of enemies for a cheap thrill is a bit like video game fast food, and if you play it in co-op, it’s a fun and accessible way to play with friends. Pirates PlundArrr, sometimes stylized as Pirates Plund-Arrr, caught my eye because it looked like a generic brawler that would be suitable for some brainless fun, but unfortunately it came up short even with that relatively low expectation.

Playing as one of four treasure-seeking pirates and able to play with up to four players, Pirates PlundArrr is less a pursuit of booty in general and instead a quest to claim the Scepter of Doom from Cap’n Rudebelly before he uses its power to rule over the seven seas. While you can unlock new characters along the way, you’ll likely wish to commit to whichever character you picked out of the gate, Pirates PlundArrr containing a level up system that is crucial to success. Your character only has a few basic attacks to draw on, there being one true attack button but options like jump kicks and super moves coming by pressing additional buttons on the Wii Remote. Shaking the remote activates a ThundARRR! attack and holding the attack button executes a similar PowARRR! attack, but they are both limited in use by magic and not too impactful due to low power even at their strongest. At its most basic a fight involves you chaining together your basic attacks to deal damage and whipping out the extra abilities if you want to deal a bit more damage, but the damage you deal is heavily stat dependent. In Pirates PlundArrr you can carry two weapons to swap between, these coming with an incredibly degree of variety but many feeling quite similar. Axes, swords, clubs, and other swinging and slashing weapons are functionally similar while daggers and guns offer long range options, and it quickly becomes clear that its best to invest in one type of swinging weapon and one type of projectile attack. Leveling up involves allocating stats to different weapon proficiencies and other stats like health and special move power, and while you can reallocate them if you use a special item down the road, a focused approach is required to avoid tedious fights.

The weapons you find along your adventure are either in chests, are rewards after boss fights, or purchased from the rare store with the cash loot you get from fights, but they all have their own individual stats and it’s quite likely you’ll find a high leveled one in your proficiency and stick to it just to ensure your damage numbers in combat are sufficient. Finding them becomes far less exciting when you have to leave so many behind to stay effective, especially since the difficulty scaling in the game is equivalent to an Olympic hurdles track. Things will be going swimmingly and the enemy resistance won’t be too much until you enter a new level and they suddenly sharply increase in strength, but once you level up things become fairly easy again, mostly reaching that sort of automatic beat ’em up mode where the violence is mindless but enjoyable on a very shallow level. When the enemies experience their abrupt bulk up, you might have to fall back on spamming jump attacks or firing weapons from afar, but the good news is that any experience points earned towards leveling up are carried over even after a death, meaning that even when you encounter the small difficulty wall, it just requires a bit of persistence to smash through it.

It is unfortunate that winning combat is often tied more to the level up system than interesting attacks from either side, most of your enemies fitting into some generic molds. There are the basic foes that are all meant to be comboed with your regular attacks pretty easily whether they’re skeletons, animate Aztec statues, fishmen, or the many reskins and dressed up versions of those three. Their strength is appearing in groups and halting your progress until they’re defeated, but it seems every enemy in the game eventually gets an annoying ability to turn intangible by way of a lightning strike and then rematerializing later, the process able to damage you and dragging out fights where they might be the last foe standing. That’s much better than the issues with the bigger enemies, the more sturdy foes who are often supplemented by the small guys not getting stunned or thrown about by your attack chains. This isn’t the main issue with them, but it pairs poorly with their own attacks, many seeming to deal damage before their attack animations truly begin and thus making the process of fighting them an unfortunate guessing game of hit and run tactics.

Bosses actually come out fairly decent though, following some conventional battle ideas like having consistent attacks you need to learn to dodge and anticipate, movement styles that allow them to close the gap or force you to pursue, and they actually inject a lot of needed variety to make up for the staling enemies. While flying foes and bomb carrying baddies are added to the regular mix, facing off with giant foes like a shaman with homing electric attacks, a squid who rams tentacles through the ship you’re fighting on, and a massive armadillo who ping-pongs around the arena actually requires a lot more thought to overcome and tactics like firing from range feel more valid since the boss usually has a way of countering the usually cheap attack methods you could otherwise rely on.

Pirates PlundArrr does try to inject some variety here and there to little effect. There are creatures you can ride around in battle, but their attacks are usually weaker than your own and you’re left sponging damage as enemies easily surround the less mobile mount. Weapons can have additional effects like poison or fire damage, although these aren’t enough to overcome the raw stat calculations needed to succeed. Some areas have hazards like falling rocks and hot water to avoid, but it all feels too little to make up for the weak design and other little problems. For example, almost every stage begins with considerable slowdown and hitching, likely the level struggling to load even after throwing you right into the action, and while the damage foes can deal during this opening part is usually very little, its just another area the game feels like it was thrown together too quickly and without much thought on how things would work together. It’s quite clearly influenced by fellow beat ’em up game Castle Crashers, right down to having a cartoonish art direction and a way to fight the other players in an arena mode, but it lacks a lot of the charm and variety of its brawler brother. Naturally having some co-op partners can ease up the issues in Pirates PlundArrr, especially since you can revive a fallen friend to help you get through the difficulty barriers more easily, but once you’ve seen the early levels of the game, you’ve essentially experienced everything you’ll find across all 40+ of them.

THE VERDICT: Pirates PlundArrr has some of the ingredients it would need to be a passable beat ’em up game. The boss fights are varied enough and most of the regular fighting is inoffensive, but a few issues here and there drag it a little below being brainless brawler fun. Technical issues like hit detection and slowdown, a heavy reliance on stats and level progression that undermines the loot and unlock system, and the weirdly abrupt strength spikes of your enemies introduce a little too much tedium and limitation to a battle system that already didn’t have too much going for it. While a game shouldn’t aspire to just be a generic beat ’em up, Pirates PlundArrr unfortunately misses even that mark since its simplicity can’t be enjoyed for all its small quirks and flaws.

And so, I give Pirates PlundArrr for Wii…

A BAD rating. While there are certainly moments you can lose yourself in the sword slashing and gun firing fights, Pirates PlundArrr’s little trip ups lead to far too much hitching to ignore. From the literal cases like the level starts and their slowdown to built-in issues like enemies whose movements don’t match how they’ll damage you, the generic thrills keep finding little bugbears that hurt an already fairly shallow experience. More variety both in your attack options and in what enemies bring to the table would certainly help this game avoid repetition, because if it had more unique and engaging fights outside of the boss battles, then it would be easier to ignore things like how the stat system restricts you rather than adding interesting complexity. Having more fights rely on player skill and movement instead of being at the right point in the leveling up process would also give the game more organic difficulty instead of its weird spikes, but the rush to release this game definitely shows in both its technical flaws and undercooked mechanics.

It is still likely you can get a group of friends together and push through Pirates PlundArrr without being absolutely bored. It has its little moments of humor, boss fights can be fun, and having friends along can lessen certain issues like difficulty and encourage looting since you can cooperate on finding better weapons as everyone chooses different proficiencies. Getting this level of enjoyment requires much more effort than just playing a well made title though, and technical problems and generic attack options aren’t solved just by having more players around to experience them. While I didn’t expect Pirates PlundArrr to be some hidden treasure, it’s unfortunately not even on par with the most run of the mill beat ’em ups thanks to having far too many rough edges to ignore.