Corsair Cove review

Corsair Cove might be the most exuberant city builder I've ever had the good fortune to play. A fantastical spin on the Golden Age of Piracy, it sees a bunch of ne'er-do-wells escape a prison ship and start a new life on a deserted island dominated by a skull-shaped mountain and imposing sheer cliffs.

This new life largely involves consuming large amounts of booze, dancing with pigs and taking turns going down ziplines. There's no grotty realism here—these pirates are living it up in paradise. But maintaining this whimsical pirate colony takes a bit of effort.

Highrise

Tropico 6 developer Limbic Entertainment has undoubtedly taken some inspiration from Tropico 2: Pirate Cove, but this is neither a follow-up to Pirate Cove or a pirate-themed reskin of Tropico 6. The vibe might be familiar, but Limbic is doing its own thing here, and Corsair Cove is all the better for it.

What we get is a logistics-heavy romp structured around vertical city building. There are plenty of pirate-themed activities you'll be able to dive into, as you send crews across the ocean on skulduggerous adventures, but they're all in aid of your city-building ambitions, netting you loot and upgrades that will help you build an efficient colony clinging onto the daunting cliffs of Skull Rock.

So let's stay on land for a wee while and dig into some city planning. The core is familiar: exploit resources throughout the island by plonking down harvesting buildings, refine them into goods in another building, and use these manufactured products to keep pirates happy, build up your wealth, and construct yet more buildings.

Beyond this well-trodden loop, however, things get pleasingly novel. You see, there's not much ground to build on, which necessitates cliff-clinging construction projects. Those then need to be linked together by bridges, ropes, ziplines, elevators and so on. These connection tools are flexible and forgiving, so you'll always find a way to hook up your buildings, but it's not enough to simply create a web of paths—they need to be efficient, too.

You'll often find that your buildings need resources that are all the way on the other side of the island, and while pirates will diligently move goods anywhere and everywhere, if they're too slow, it creates a bottleneck, disrupting your economy and potentially sending your colony's denizens into a grog-soaked rage.

Whenever you encounter a bottleneck, though, you'll find yourself with a bevy of options that can help resolve it. This is one of Corsair Cove's greatest strengths—it's abundant with solutions. If you've got resources waiting at the top of a cliff, for instance, build a zipline to get them down faster. If your warehouse's supply of ale is lacking, you can create a link to a second ale supply. Alternatively, you can just tell your tavern to grab the ale directly from the source, rather than the warehouse.

Click on a building and you'll see all the paths that fuel it, colour coded so you know how efficient they are. This makes it incredibly easy to identify problems before deploying something from your broad arsenal of solutions.

Eventually you'll have a mind-bending mess of connecting paths going up and down the cliffs and across vast chasms, making your colony look like the product of a very ambitious (and possibly drunk) spider. It's so much more visually impressive than a tangle of motorways in, say, Cities: Skylines, and there's something extremely appealing about being able to see all of the solutions to your logistical conundrums expressed physically all across the island.

Corsair Cove is, broadly, an absolute snack. It's got Sea of Thieves' vibrant colour palette, with lots of flourishes evocative of more fantastical pirate fiction, like Hook and Pirates of the Caribbean. There's joy to be had simply soaking it all in, studying the eccentric buildings with all of their cute little details. My personal favourite is the pig being spun around by a pirate standing on a tavern table—neither of them ever tire.

Shipshape

But don't spend too much time soaking up the atmosphere—there's piracy to be done. When you construct a ship you need to fill it with a crew, adding their own stats to the vessel, alongside a captain, each with their own special abilities, represented as cards that can be deployed during your high seas adventures. And then off they jet, as you send them to search for treasure, hunt down ships or embark on smuggling runs.

The seafaring romps are surprisingly involved—though they're always brisk. In a fight, you'll deploy defensive, offensive or utility cards that can damage vessels or their crew, protect your own ship, or claw back the supplies you spend activating cards. But you've also got stealth missions where you'll use cards to sneak around, or chases where the cards will let you close gaps or flee enemies. Dice rolls then determine how successful you are.

Initially, it can feel like you have far too many options for what are very simple adventures, but as you tackle higher tier adventures, all these tools will become a godsend. It's impressive how much Limbic has managed to fit into a system that you'll only spend a few minutes with at a time, and it's equally impressive how all the stats, cards and dice rolls still feel manageable in these short spurts.

The RNG can be a right bastard though, and I encountered a number of adventures where there was simply nothing I could do to win, necessitating a bit of save scumming. This is more forgivable when the seafaring adventures are so short, though.

While the city building and seafaring are both distinct, featuring completely separate mechanics, they elevate each other rather than being at odds, tied as they are to the campaign and the novel progression system. It's through both of these things that you define the kind of pirate monarch you want to be, represented by four pirate principles: Empire, Notoriety, Seafaring and Wealth.

You can focus on one or dip into each of them, moving the campaign forward and unlocking new tech—there's a tech compass rather than a tech tree—by performing deeds connected to each principle. Some unlocks are shared, or do similar things, but others are unique to one principle. You'll find larger homes for your pirates, upgrades to your gathering and production buildings, access to new resources, and brand new ships with different stats and specialisations.

Some of the deeds will task you with creating efficient routes between buildings, or having a certain number of pirates living in your colony, while others will send you off to explore the seven seas where you'll get into all sorts of scrapes. This way, everything is connected. Working on your colony will help you out at sea, and hitting the ocean will help you make a larger, more efficient colony.

It's a fantastic progression system that's inherently more engaging than a simple tech tree fuelled by some random abstract currency. Your choices have weight, and your colony and fleet are directly linked not just to the kind of pirate monarch you want to be, but the kind of pirate monarch you're actually showing yourself to be.

Since you're never forced to pick a focus, though, it can be easy to fall into a trap. If you try to play broad, dipping into every principle equally, you'll end up chasing your tail as you try to satisfy all the demands being flung at you. You'll quickly find yourself unravelling as you're forced to manage too many different kinds of pirates, ships and buildings, which may end in a colony-wide mutiny.

Pirate code

This doesn't mean you just need to pick a single principle to dedicate your life to, however, and when crises do arise Corsair Cove tends to give you some breathing room to resolve them. If, for instance, you're short on quality footwear for your pirates' calloused hooves, you're given multiple opportunities to fix the shortfall, and you can always claw your way back from the precipice as long as you have some cohesion—the currency that effectively serves as your colony's health bar.

Cohesion can also be spent, though, so you really need to stay on top of it. You'll encounter lots of random events where the rewards will be balanced by a cohesion cost, and critically it's one of the few ways you can get more pirates early on, as there's no passive population growth. If you want to welcome a bunch of shipwrecked pirates into your colony, you'll take a cohesion hit.

This is a bit frustrating in the early game, as you'll be desperate for more pirates and more cohesion without a reliable method to get either of them. Unlike the other logistical bottlenecks, this one often leaves you just waiting, ramping up the in-game speed as you hope for some good luck. Eventually, however, this becomes less of an issue as you unlock buildings and opportunities to get more of both.

Corsair Cove can sometimes devolve into a stressful juggling act, then, but for the bulk of my time it's been plain sailing. There are a lot of ways in which it's smoothed out the city building process without sacrificing the joy that comes with solving complex logistical problems. It's been a pleasant palate cleanser after Anno 117, now that I don't have to worry about servicing individual households or stressing about building radiuses. There are fewer irritants and niggles, but I feel just as busy and engaged.

It sits somewhere in between a low-stress, cosy city builder like Fabledom and a highly-involved logistics puzzler like Whiskerwood or Factorio, taking the best elements from both. And when it does throw out some curveballs, it gives you plenty of time to figure out what to do before everything goes up in smoke.

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