Pixel Privateers is a retro styled, 16-bit, side scrolling adventure gaming set in space. Having traveled through an intergalactic wormhole, you are tasked with finding a way to return home. The means to get home, restore the relics and stabilize the wormhole, is set in stone, but how you get to the goal is broad and varied.
Initially, you have a team of 2 characters. Their skills and abilities are based on the equipment you give them. Throughout the game, you are given opportunities to gain more characters, through quests, recruiting them at the spaceport, or cloning the characters you already have. However, mission difficulty adjusts based on the size of your team, so having a larger or smaller team is simply a matter of preference.
According to Koster’s Theory of Fun, having ever evolving game challenges and puzzles leads to a more engaging and enjoyable experience. To this end, the depth and variety of missions is fairly limited. Everything from “go collect X number of these” to “go kill X number of those” is present and accounted for. The variety of play comes from having the player choose to take any number of characters, from 1 up to 8, as well as having 7 different difficulty settings to choose from. Where Privateers falls short is in the difficulty settings. Challenge levels vary from -2 to +7, however, choosing anything below +3 makes the game feel shallow and too easy, leaving the player to feel removed and dejected.
Privateers strength, according to Lazzaro’s Four Keys to Fun come in the form of Hard fun and Easy fun. Players can experience Fiero by selecting the highest difficulty setting for any given mission, as well as by taking the fewest number of characters, thus limiting the skill diversity and situation adaptability. Where this falls short is in a hard floor of gameplay. Without taking a healer character, difficulties +5 and above become nearly impossible. Players can experience Curiosity by lowering the difficulty and exploring the galaxy, getting to see a multitude of terrain from different worlds and trying out different equipment and play styles with little fear of failure. This playstyle has little depth, as it becomes readily apparent that very specific weapons are useful, and everything else pales in comparison, in addition to limited world tile sets.
In following Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types, Privateers is definitely more focused on Achievers, having a depth of achievements on tap, Killers, having an infinite level cap and story reset, and Explorers, offering never-ending quests.
Each class has 3 modes of operation based on their “tool” equipped. Weapon types range from long distance sniper rifles to close range flamethrowers and shotguns. Team compositions vary anywhere from 1 to 8 characters, each with 3-5 different skills and abilities. All of these factors combine to allow the players to adjust their gameplay experience to their liking. At this stage of game development, many of those players’ decisions have become “meta” and there is a definitive “best” team composition. Additionally, with only 6 bosses to beat and the game is won, and few requirements to challenge these bosses, the game can feel quite short and shallow to an experienced player.
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