Crazy Pirate review

A pirate’s zombie-killing aerial adventure.

Crazy Pirate is a short, casual affair that will appeal to players wanting something fast and easy. Currently available for less than a dollar on Crazy Pirate’s Steam page, it’s a game that you can complete between 1-2 hours. If you prefer longer or more challenging experiences, expect to be disappointed, because there’s as much content in Crazy Pirate as there is in countless free flash games that are available online.

You play Crazy Pirate by holding the mouse button, dragging in any direction, and releasing. The mouse works like a slingshot, so you have to drag the mouse in the opposite direction to which you want to travel. The further you drag the mouse, the faster you’ll go.

Littered throughout each level is a number of zombies that you have to kill to reach the treasure. A barrier blocks access to the treasure and somehow disappears after the last zombie is killed. Once you collect the treasure, you can continue to the next level. Each level also contains a number of coins. You don’t need to collect coins to progress, but they’ll improve your score – each level has a rating that goes up to three stars. You don’t need to collect all the coins to achieve three stars, as I got three stars in over half the levels just by casually picking them up.

The music is nice, but sounds familiar. I can’t quite place whether I’ve heard it before. The music in each stage sounds like something you would hear in a car racing game, but it’s easy on the ears at the same time.

The developer, Sergej110, has crammed 500 achievements into the hour-long game. There are 400 achievements to be collected for doing nothing but waiting, 80 achievements for collecting coins, and 20 achievements for completing the twenty levels. The constant achievements are needless and distracting, and they left me wondering how to disable the achievement notifications. To make things worse, many achievements had a bunch of annoying pictures, like pirate clipart, Stewie Griffin, and freaking Batman.

There are several other annoying issues with Crazy Pirate. The game never tells you how to control your movement, so I spent around 30 seconds clicking around doing nothing before I realised I had to click and drag. A bigger annoyance is that, considering the goal is to kill zombies, there’s no counter telling you how many more zombies you need to kill. There’s nothing more annoying than finding the treasure, thinking you killed all the zombies, but then having to backtrack to find the ones you missed. It’s also possible to die just by shooting yourself too fast in one direction. The screen only travels so fast, and if your character leaves the boundaries of the screen, you die.

Crazy Pirate is a charming game, but you’ll probably be finished with it in less than two hours and there’s little reason to return once you’ve completed it. If you’re interested in an easy game with unusual mechanics, Crazy Pirate may be the game for you. If not, you should give it a pass. Personally, I won’t be recommending it to my friends.