There’s no shortage of pirate games out there, but pirate strategy games? You might have to go back (gulp) 40 years to Sid Meier’s Pirates for the last decent one, and that was more RPG than strategy anyway. Corsair Cove fills a long neglected hole.

Corsair Cove starts off as a gorgeous city builder, with detailed structures hanging off the side of cliffs, joined together by precarious-looking rope bridges. But it soon reveals extra depth once you’ve built your first ship, allowing you to appoint a captain and sail off to neighboring islands to complete missions and expand the story.

It’s another treasure from the ever-reliable Hooded Horse stable, and it’s setting sail with a full release this week.

City Building With A Difference

Most city builders have you gradually expand your empire across the landscape. With Corsair Cove , you’re largely building up and around cliffs, rather than expanding the footprint of your colony.

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All of this is achieved with a brilliantly designed construction system where buildings such as pirate tents, galleys and sawmills cling to rock faces. Certain structures, such as woodcutters’ huts must be placed near natural resources, but for the most part you’re free to place your buildings where you wish, within the confines of your current camp.

That’s not to say you can litter buildings around the cliff edges without forethought. Some buildings are paired: campfires should be placed close to galleys, for example, so that your fetchers don’t have to traverse long distances to ferry food from one to the other. And before long you’ve got complex production chains and limited space to work in, forcing you to think carefully about placement and making sure certain structures aren’t too far from one another, or else you end up with a rat’s nest of paths criss-crossing the cliffs.

It’s also pretty easy to forget about vital buildings. In my first run through, I forgot to build warehouses to store supplies in, meaning my camp was often running low on food or full of idle producers, who had nowhere to stash their goods.

Linking buildings together is achieved with an immaculate pathing tool that makes it very simple to join structures, even if they’re on different cliff faces. As the game evolves, you’re given access to connectors such as ziplines and lifts that make it easier to transport goods up and down the vertical cliff faces, but beware that these often come with a punishing cost in gold. Again, careful planning is required; Corsair Cove penalizes the “bung it anywhere” merchants.

Setting Sail In Corsair Cove

Corsair Cove is almost a game of two parts: on island and off. And the off island part starts the moment you construct your first ship.

Even before that, you’ll face attacks from passing pirates, forcing you to upgrade your colony’s defenses. But once you’ve started building your own fleet, you must pick a captain (four different characters have different skills and abilities), pack as many free hands on to the boat as possible to form a crew, and then set sail for missions dotted around neighbouring islands or engage with passing ships.

This exposes you to the battle system, which is arguably the weakest part of Corsair Cove . It’s part picking from a deck of cards, part gambling on the roll of the dice, the combination of which makes it feel like the outcome of battles is too heavily weighted towards chance.

Different missions have different ship requirements, so you’ll need to work hard to unlock next-level ships at the pirate colony before you can tackle the more advanced missions. All of this requires plenty of mental ball juggling. For example, when you’ve unlocked the second tier of ships, you’ll need to produce bread to man the ship with a new type of crew, meaning there’s dependencies on top of dependencies on top of dependencies. I found myself reaching for a pen and paper, just to keep on top of what I needed to unlock next.

Lose a ship in battle and you’ll be given a choice of what to save: the crew, the plunder or the captain, presenting you with another set of difficult choices. As much as the skipper may grumble when you do, retreating back to base for repairs rather than taking on multiple missions on the same voyage is often the safer option.

Corsair Cove: The Verdict

There’s plenty to enjoy in Corsair Cove : the novel system of building around cliffs, the wonderfully detailed graphics, exploring the outer islands and expanding the storyline through missions, to name a few highlights.

There are parts that will give those who aren’t hardcore strategy fans a headache. Several times I wished I could tear a camp down and start over, so ridiculously complex had the colony and its many inter-dependencies become. But that would almost certainly trigger a collapse in pirate morale, and only a fool plunges a bunch of cut-throat maniacs into a stupor.

Still, the option to get away from it all and set sail on a mission prevents the grind of camp management from becoming overwhelming, giving you a welcome break on the seas and a chance to move the story forward. And potentially discover treasure that will keep the savages at home from tearing the place down.

It’s taken 40 years for a decent pirate strategy game to arrive. Don’t let Corsair Cove sail past.