Pirate Commander is a newly announced strategy game where the player has to manage their own colonial era pirate ship, fighting against naval boats and mythological creatures alike. Don’t get too excited though. I know this is a pirate game, but there are a lot of red flags going on here.
Pirate Commander is developed and published by Rock Game. It was announced yesterday with a new trailer. But to be frank, I don’t trust it for a number of reasons. Let’s break it down one at a time.
The first warning sign was that the announcement trailer looked like gameplay, but isn’t actually gameplay. The trailer shows game elements like managing stats and cutouts of the ship, health bars, etc. But it’s not hard to see that the entire video is actually pre-rendered animations. This is a concern because it implies that the developers intend to mislead the consumer as to how the game will actually look, gameplay wise.
The second red flag is with the publisher/developer. This is the fifth game that the publisher has announced with a TBA release date, four of which are also under development by the same company. They don’t have a single published game yet. How can a small scale studio have three games in production, none with a release date, but still announce a fourth. None of the games look tremendously similar either, discarding the theory that they’re simply reskins of each other.
My theory: This is a company that is using premade game assets to produce cheaply made games as quickly as possible. To encourage sales, they’re possibly using deceptive trailers and marketing strategies. I cannot confirm any of this, unfortunately.
Long story short, while Pirate Commander looks cool, I have little faith that the game will actually be any good. Don’t get your hopes up here. It’s on Steam, either way.
