Earlier this week I posted about a new game I was playing called Star Pirates. I’ve played quite a bit more now and have gotten the hang of the game and it really is ingenious and fun, so here’s a complete review.

The Basics

The idea is simple and easy to learn, which is partly what makes the game great. I think they put it best:

“The Earth is destroyed - space miners stationed in the Asteroids struggle for survival. Gangs of Star Pirates loot old hulks, scavenge resources, attack and raid each other’s ships and fight for dominance of the stars.

Gamble, explore, mine asteroids, upgrade your ship, research weapons, shields and engine technology. Donors within the game become “Notorious Star Pirates” with additional features.”

Now I ask you - who wants to be a Star Pirate searching for loot, fighting other gangs in space, gambling and destroying your enemies? Pick me, Pick me!

You sign up, you grab a ship and you’re off. It’s that simple.

Home Page

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll have a basic ship (which you can upgrade once you earn some credits). You can take a look at your home page which gives you loads of info:

You get your basic info on how much research units you have remaining (important in order to improve your ship), energy, cargo, experience, what state your ship is in and what is installed on your ship. Plus, find out how well you’re doing in battle (I’m over 50%!)

You get started by searching through some space debris, pulling the slots and doing some simple mining. Pretty soon you have enough cash to start improving your lot in space.

Research

In order to improve your ship and thus improve your chances in battle, you must continually research technology to make your ship better. This uses up some energy, so you balance the desire to fight and the desire to improve your ship, because it takes time to regenerate that energy.

As you gain levels you get more research units available to you. I’ve noticed as I’ve researched more my ship has definitely gotten tougher.

In Space and Points

You start out at the lowly Mars station, but as you gain levels and experience you can travel to further out places like Jupiter station. At all stations you can pick through debris once an hour to find good stuff (credits and even weapons and armor), play the lottery, visit the items store, upgrade your ship and even sell points. Points allow you to regenerate energy quicker, buy extra turns searching through garbage and more. Points can be purchased through Upgrade Account by using a PayPal account to support our site, from other players swapping for cargo in the points market and you can sometimes find them in the asteroid belts. Upgrading is cheap and can be done through PayPal - I think the I bought some points for $3 and they lasted me a long time.

You can pick a ship out of the scan result on the right and attack! Yeah, that’s why we’re here!

A great victory for me (yeah I picked on a little guy, so what!)

Summary

I’ve really only touched on the basics here, but you can see the game is really simple to play - but really fun too. You can upgrade to be “Notorious” and you get the benefit of quicker regeneration, certain monies going to straight to the bank instead of being exposed to pirates (great for selling points) and more.

Even better, you can join a Fleet (or make your own!) and battle it out with other fleets in all out war! Is this much fun even legal anymore?! All I spend is a few minutes on lunch and break during the day and I’m having great fun with this game.

Head over to Star Pirates and really give it a try - it’s totally free and all you need is your browser. You won’t regret it - I give it 5 out of 5 stars. And say hello to Dekker (me) while you’re there!

Tags: Games, Star Pirates

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Blog, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.