Swords & Crossbones: An Epic Pirate Story (Video Game Review)

Swords & Crossbones: An Epic Pirate Story is a very interesting game, it’s basically pirate story that also integrates city management elements. Unlike other pirate themed games on Steam, however, this one is designed as a pixelated title, and it does manage to impress while still remaining easy on the eyes which is what matters the most.


When it comes to the RPG side of the game, I have to say that this title is delivering an old school turn based grid system that is similar to that of NES RPG games, such as Final Fantasy or newer Heroes games. The idea is that characters have a move radius and the enemies will have one as well--so you need to traverse the region based on your stats. There are plenty of water tiles that can be traversed with ease, but they do restrict the user actions.

The actions which can be performed by a user are quite varied and they range from skills, abilities, using items, spells, regular attacks and a wide range of other tools at your disposal. The main idea here is very simple, you need to do whatever it takes in order to harness the abilities you have, and the more enemies you eliminate the better the results you can obtain.

Enemies can be very powerful and fierce or weak and dumb. The ones that are important to the story are powerful, but when you stay away from boss battles and focus on the regular enemies they rarely pose a challenge, which is understandable. You can avoid random battles though, but keep in mind that island liberation battles are mandatory so you can’t skip those.

Swords & Crossbones: An Epic Pirate Story has a very fun story that was enjoyable with its epic pursuit on revenge and rescue. The characters are varied and funny most of the time, and the overall graphics design does wonders for the story as well. The graphics managed to work well with the game without having to be very impressive.

The city management side requires you to create your own pirate island and thus create houses for the crew. You also have to get resources, craft new equipment pieces as well as build up larger ships. These islands can also expand in order to become suitable for tourism and that can be very exciting to be honest. You will need to defeat enemies if you want to expand your empire, and you will also need to clear islands in order to do so. The entire experience manages to add a great deal of replay ability to the title and has you playing more and more.

Since Swords & Crossbones: An Epic Pirate Story is a casual game you don’t really feel the urge to rush through and can enjoy a few dozen times after your hooked. It’s an exciting game that really makes you feel like a pirate even if it isn‘t visually the best looking title out there, so if you are interested into this sort of stuff then you should totally give it a try on Steam.


Score: 7 out of 10

Reviewed for PC