Swords & Crossbones: An Epic Pirate Story

Enough to keep you occupied for a cheap game, but I wouldn't call it "good"

Crashes pretty often (remember to manual save). So far I've found it does it if: - you demolish a decoration building while at fast forwarded speed, - you capture a land and sea animal in the same battle. Pretty normal situations actually. So I'm surprised it hasn't been picked up and addressed.

Keeps the mobile 'feel', by not selecting stuff sometimes even if you can see your mouse hitting it. Fat fingering simulated on pc 2022.

First of all... I don't write reviews of games I've played on here, and I've played some really good games on Steam, some of them really good SRPGs. So why did I write a review of this one?

I mean, it's not like combat is anything to write home about. Anyone expecting the in-depth use of positioning and teamwork from the likes of XCOM or Shadowrun will be sorely disappointed. There's clearly stuff that the developers wanted to do to make it interesting, but you get into combat more because you have to progress than anything else. The music isn't that great either, especially when it loops around so much. Everything you've read about the UI being garbage? Completely true. As for upgrading equipment... well, this is the first game where I've been able to break the in-game economy just by having it running while I go have dinner.

So why am I giving a POSITIVE review for a RPG that has mediocre combat, annoying music and upgrades that are way too easy to get? Well... it's because everything else is so charming that it makes up for it. The art design uses pixel art in a way that manages to combine cute and ugly in a way that's kinda neat. The townbuilding mechanics have enough weight to them that I ended up basically making half the island into a weird nature preserve with lots of monkeys with a tree each to climb. The sea exploration minigame is simple yet raises genuine tension with a great risk-reward balance.

And the writing... I sometimes rewatch a now-defunct YouTube LP series called Let's Drown Out. It's great, you should go watch it. Anyway, sometimes they answered questions from their viewers, and one of those was "Have you ever played a game where the writing made you want to keep playing?". I don't believe they could find an example, but I can: Swords & Crossbones. There's only a handful of SRPGs that have tried to be funny - the subgenre tends to be rather serious in tone by default, and games that try and be comedic are usually more Sunset Overdrive than Hitchiker's Guide. However, there is something about this game's writing that has what I can only describe as "endearingly goofy". There's a lot of leaning on the fourth wall, but it never breaks it; the characters are all distinct without becoming one-note; there are moments of genuine warmth, especially near the end.

I've spent over two DAYS playing this game (which it turns out is probably five times as long as most people have played it) and it was purely to find out how the story ended) and it was just to see how the story ended. Trust me, you'll want to do the same. Well, maybe not spending 50+ hours on it, but you know what I mean. Sometimes, it's okay for a game to be good, not great. That's not damning with faint praise, it's just a solid recommendation.

But yeah, get it in a sale or something. And remember to turn off music and put on a podcast/audiobook/playlist of much better piratey music... THEN you can get your swordy time on.

This trailer of the game seems very promising: as a pirate for revenge, you can gather resources, build your village, rescue fellow pirates, and level up your party members.
The combination sounds very attractive, right? Yes.
Has the game actually delivered all the playable elements? Yes.
Is the game fun? Kind of.
Is it recommended? Of course not.

Graphic: I'm generally neutral to Swords & Crossbones in this aspect.

Music and Sound: I turned both off after 1 hour of game play, so you know what to expect...

Game system: All the elements they showed in the trailer are present, however, they seem to be spliced together by weak glues. None of them is outstanding, and their combination does not make things any better. The battles are boring and unbalanced.

Control: This is the WORST user interface in game I've ever seen in the past several years. For almost doing everything, you need to do at least twice the clicks as that you would do in another turn-based strategy game with an average-level UI.

The Princess Blizzardo is in another castle island!

Swords & Crossbones: An Epic Pirate Story is a port of a mobile game that mix island management and turn based combat. Both parts are well done, but what might scare people off is that it is a mobile game and play as one.

In my undertanding, it is not a game to be kept in widescreen and doing nothing else, you will get bored and it'll feel extremely repetitive(It's a long game!20h+). I only manage to enjoy it once i had it windowed, music turned off and played while listening to podcasts and browsing the internet. So before buying you might consider this conditions.

It is a good game, but if you dont like tactical combat or/and city management games this game is not for you(run from it)!

Basically Final Fantasy Tactics made simpler, making this game easy to pickup and play. The simplistic mechanic, in other hand , makes this game repetitive after 5+ hours. Still good game though. And cheapmlem

Swords & Crossbones: An Epic Pirate Story is a turn-based strategy, base building, RPG that follows your character, the brand new Pirate Captain, on their quest to take down the evil Duke A. Blizzardo and rescue your friend/employer.

A quick note to make about this game in your mind is that this game is a very comedical game and, as such, doesn't take itself seriously at all. If you are looking for Dark Souls X Firewatch seriousness then you are out of luck.

Pros:
The game has a smart story
The writing in the game is very well done and will provide many laughs
Game doesn't tend to hold your hand
Extra Side quests and Adventuring to do
Upgrade-able equipment
Leveling and Perk system
"Quick Combat" system that allows for speeding up for combat
Town and City upgrading
Did I mention that you are a pirate captain? And get your own crew?

Cons:

UI is very difficult to put up with
Combat is extremely repetitive
Game is fairly short
UI designed more like a mobile game than a PC game
Tended to be very grindy and take a long time to build up town


Overall I had a great time with this nice little indie title. If you can get past the coating of bad UI and repetitive combat. You will have a great, original, funny, turn-based, strategy, RPG, pirate game.

Rating : 6/10

This is a tablet game ported to the PC, and it feels like it.

Unfortunately the menus and buttons are all over the place, forcing you to move across your mouse across the entire screen. Even confirming attacks requires quite a bit of mouse movement. Also there aren't any sound effects for the buttons. While the ui's buttons do work on mouse-up.. they don't have a pressed state.

This game simply breaks down to Sims management on a pirate tourist trap, and turn-based combat with an interesting storyline albeit riddled with typoes and grammatical errors but i'll just assume that the dev's first language is not English. Also you're a pirate so you upgrade pirate ships, craft stuff, etc.

I paid a $1-ish for this game and for that, it's amazing. At $5, it's still worth it and I would still recommend it. I didn't "dilly-dally" too much and got 21 hours out of the game, start to finish with all achievements unlocked.

Down-side:
-Game can crash A LOT. Sometimes it never happens, sometimes it happens... TOO often. It didn't really crash initially but I started building my island up with tourist-ey stuff and utilizing the 16x speed and it can freeze up a lot and crash unexpectedly. I have also had it crash in lots of battles when too many units are doing too many things too quickly. Seems to happen when the game is trying to keep track of all the effects on the map currently for each person.
-Weird AI behavior so be careful if you're playing and want your team to kind of do their own thing, they can sometimes send out people such as the healer to the front of the line??
-Some stuff in the stores even end-game I could barely afford, so the prices aren't completely sensical where-as other items I had an over-abundance of supplies.

It's fun, but buggy is the short answer which is imo as expected for a game that came from mobile devices and got on to Steam. :O

This is a very fun and little pirate-sim game, but the game lacks shortcut keys, for skills, for building and buying in bulk, you're only option is to click on everything via mouse and down the road this becomes very tiresome!!

It have alot of battles and it lacks an auto-resolve quick button, which can save alot of time.

And these 2 are biggest draw-backs in the game that made me not finish it.

buy only on 75% discounts

Fan of FFTA and the like, this seemed promising, it did not deliver. Mind you, I just have 4 team members, but my complaints so far will not be lightened by extra gametime. The humor is okay, but the citybuilding element is extremely shallow(as you can speed up the game instead of upgrading), and there are just too many annoyances:

- The game is too slow. No queueing commands, fast movement button. It's fun seeing your characters move for some time, but it doesn't take long for me to get bored of waiting for walking.
- The music, oh god. Two tracks of maybe a minute, one for combat and one for exploration mode. Mute quickly.
- No control options but LMB, on EVERYTHING. Designed for touch screen.
- Especially egregious when placing characters, pick character at top screen, click okay at bottom of screen, click new guy at top screen, click okay at bottom of screen, GRAH. Want someone moved one space to the left? That's four clicks. Want to switch two characters because you accidentally put the tank first? That's at least ten. You'll be pressing auto after two battles. Just make it click-and-drag devs! Dragging onto another character to make them switch places! Most facebook games get this!
- Even when there is a context sensitive option like "open chest", this is clicking on actions, on open chest, on the chest, and on okay. This could be one click on the chest.
- Nope, not even escape to open the game menu. Oddly enough, the exploration menu items get hotkeys.
- No way to check mission objective during battle. Or save. Luckily fleeing is almost free. You just need to WAIT for some time while your guys run back and forth.
- No way to decide which pirate gets the new house if multiple pirates are homeless.
- No scrolling through the message log. Artilleryman fires at 4 units? I hope you can read fast.

Indubitably going to finish because I'm an achievement whore.

EDIT: Actively updated, as it was just two days after I posted this that the instantaneous battle movement button was added. It's not perfect, enemies can jumble real quick, but yay!

Swords & Crossbones is an RPG/City-building hybrid with tactical, isometric battles and overworld sea exploration. I'm really torn with this game because I did have fun, but at the cost of frequent frustration due to confusing menus or simple battles that take ten minutes to finish (yawn). Recommended ONLY if on sale or very cheap.

PROS
+ Charming characters and witty writing that actually made me laugh once or twice
+ Complex, diverse battlefields make each battle unique (but...see Cons)
+ Mix of overworld management, tactical battles, and sea exploration keeps things fresh

CONS
- Battles take way too long (FOUR clicks to attack the enemy right next to me?!)
- UI is clunky, dated, and ugly
- Confusing menus frequently made me miss dialogue or important info (my character is a girl?)
- Graphics are several generations old
- Feels more suited towards the iPad

It's not horrible so far, but the UI is pure pain. No tooltips either.

In order to attack an enemy (which is especially early one the only action you can do):
1) Click "Actions"
2) Click "Attack"
3) Click on target (The pseudo-height means this is sometimes quite difficult / buggy)
4) Click "Confirm"

Instead this could be changed into:
1) Click on target to attack
(Alle relevevant information shown as tooltip on mouseover)

Or another example:
KO-Units block movement. In order to walk past them you have to use the action "swap" to swap position with them. It's just terrible UX design.

Overall, I would recommend this game for the sake of the comic tone and the play, which is similar to Beastie Islands from Keiro.

Several points of improvement :
The game is too easy, as long as you improve your main character and his gunner before moving out. All I had to do was to fight the crocs and bird on my main island a few times and I am OP for the next few islands.
The building process is too troublesome. It is hard to find the correct building I want in the midst of all the others. For example, I need to upgrade the house of the correct person before I can upgrade his workplace. But I can't find it if there are 15 more people on the island!
The production for the basic commodities (food, wood, cotton, etc) is too slow, in the end, i just go out there to salvage shipwrecks and use the gold I find to buy commodities.
The MMI for buying and selling commodities needs to be improved. I have tons of money but need to buy tons of wood and food to build stuff. Unfortunately, I can't buy it in the same store window and have to move to find the market place.
At the end of the day, I can easily leave the game to idle for half an hour and find my stores all filled up to use.

But those said, the game is still recommended for the comic relief and turn-based strategy fights.
I love the references to several games I have played before within the game as well as other characters in real life.
The varying terrain and combat maps are good.
The difference classes are varied enough with their own strength and weaknesses to make the strategy very interesting.
I love the exploration sailing, simply to clear out the map and go from port to port. Perhaps add in a trading aspect to the game?
I also love to build my own island. I practically spent more time shifting things around so that they look nice and function than sailing around... I do wish that the tourism aspect can be more complex, like making the tourist visit the party's houses to offer them unique weapons and quests?

3 more things to add.
1. Pirates whom are added on later in the game ought to start with more training points for their skils or at least have some skills already invested in
2. The barbarian's weapons skipped a level in production as the Executioner's Axe and the one below it require the same weapon for upgrade
3. The zoo and aquarium are hard to fill up simply because the monsters are too weak and get killed before i can capture them

Swords & Crossbones, aka Dark Cloud Tactics! Well, kind of. ;-)

I bought this game for a mere $3 during the Steam halloween sale, not expecting anything spectacular, but I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by this game. I started it up for the first time planning to kill some time waiting for some other games to download/install, but then I just ended up playing Swords & Crossbones for like 5 straight hours.

COMBAT: On one hand, it's a tactical RPG. You're going to be fighting lots of battles where you move specialized units on a grid map and engage enemy units in turn-based combat. As your units participate in battles, they gain XP which levels them up and improves their overall stats, but they also earn Ability Points which can be spent to unlock and upgrade their unique abilities in whatever order you like. The game follows essentially a revenge plot, where first you have to go one-by-one bust your pirate friends out of various island prisons, which is how you get your new recruits. There are various bosses to fight as you go. When you're on a battle map, in addition to just plain old fighting, you can also trap non-human monsters and use your thief to open locked chests that randomly appear on some maps. Maps also frequently include powder kegs, which you can hit with a ranged attack to blow up and deal massive damage to any units standing directly adjacent, which is useful for kiting and damaging more difficult units.

MANAGEMENT: When you're not in combat, the game shifts to being a sort of simulation/management/trading/economy type game. Your pirate band takes over their own island and starts setting up houses, storage buildings, a tavern, a pier, etc. You have to build a house for everyone in your party if you want them to work for you (otherwise they just stand around doing nothing). You recruit various non-combatant NPCs onto your colony that take up professions like lumberjacking, farming, building, smithing, mining, cooking, etc. You have to build a house for all of these people AND a shop for them to engage in their trade. Your combatant allies will serve as generalized laborers that help carry resources to storage. The resources you create can be sold directly or they can be used to build and expand. A little later you can even start a thriving tourism industry on your island, once you're able to build leisure/entertainment businesses. There is even a weapon/armor crafting system, although it isn't entirely available until several hours into the game.

EXPLORATION: This was the surprising part. You also have to explore in this game. When you first land on an island, it's covered with fog and various battle symbols that show each unexplored section of the island. You have to battle your way through each section to uncover it and make it passable/useable. On your home island, this makes the land useable. On islands you visit on the ocean, it just makes that area passeable or sometimes unlocks hidden objectives or reveals underlying towns where you can rest your party or pick up missions. Exploring over land is pretty simple, but exploring over sea requires a boat. The boat can only hold so many party members at first, so upgrading to bigger boats that hold more party members is an obvious goal. You also can only stay on the open water as long as you have food supplies on board (which you bring with you from home or catch using a fishing equipment upgrade). If you run out of food, you are forced to return home immediately.

All in all, it's a fun combination of tactical RPG combat, simulation, and exploration. It's pretty cartoony and lighthearted as well, which I tend to prefer over grimdark.

Does the game have any downsides, though? Yeah, a few. The tutorials don't explain certain aspects of the game clearly enough, so you should be prepared to be somewhat confused at first on how certain systems work. For example, the game explains to you that upgrading buildings requires meeting certain decoration requirements, but the game doesn't sufficiently explain the symbols used in the decoration system, what they mean, or what to do about them. There can also be a certain point at the beginning where you may feel frustrated because you don't know if you should be focusing on exploring/fighting or just letting your economy run and focusing on development. It would also be nice if the game had some kind of hotkeys to use for battles instead of making you click all over the place, but clicking all over the place you will have to do. I also feel like there is a huge disparity in the usefulness of abilities, with some of them feeling extremely helpful and others being so heavily penalized (e.g. using a lot of abilities forces you to deal 0 damage in exchange for inflicting a status effect, but the status effect usually only has like a 30 to 50% chance to hit, so when you first learn them they feel pretty useless). It can also be frustrating that enemy units use status effects so aggressively, and your only defense against it is the healer's "remedy" spell, which only has like a 30% chance of success, which again feels like a pretty steep handicap. But you CAN get through it.

I also encountered two bugs while playing, though it wasn't so bad, since they turned out to be the kind that help you. On one particular island, there were two battles in a row where I placed my units and clicked the "ready" button to begin the battle and was immediately shown the VICTORY screen as if I had won, but not a single unit had moved. I still got all the loot and XP though.

It would also be nice if the ships or units, when traveling on the map, would cancel their current destination when you click on a new destination. At present, they will continue traveling to wherever you first clicked and won't recognize new clicks until they reach wherever they're currently traveling. It's not so bad on land, but it can be annoying on sea where you have rations to worry about and they get burned away because your boat isn't smart enough to abort the current destination and switch to a new one. But it's still manageable. Just use short "baby step" clicks to your destination and you'll be alright.

Finally, I wish there were something like secrets or treasures or some other kind of unique discoveries to make when exploring. Even though you can explore and fight as much as you want, your progress and objectives are still ultimately pretty tightly woven to the game's story missions. I like that the game has sidequests available from the tavern, but it would be nice if there were some sidequests that were a little more interesting than just battles.

Overall, I am pretty pleased by this game. I would love to see a sequel to it or just another game similar to it that expands on the ideas and makes both the TRPG half and the exploration/management half even more complex and engaging.

First off, i haven't finished the game yet, but i'm planning to.
This should already tell what i feel about the game:
I truly like it.
The turn-based combat is solid. There are enough enemy units and crazy bosses to play for a while (30+hours).
Each unit has its own use, being effective in its own way.
The "create your own pirate island" part wasn't important to me, i just hoped it wouldn't get in my way:
I have to say that it's quite fun to figure out where to place buildings and decorations (the last enabling to upgrade the first).
This game is not an open world game like i thought, but the exploration part is still consistent.
I also love the art and dialogues, some cliché of 8 and 16 bits RPG are turned into puns and jokes in a satisfaying way.
If you like turn-based combat and pirates, go get it!
If you like building up characters/cities, go get it!
If you're none of the above, take a look at some vids and...decide to pick it up now to help the devs.

A great time killer and a truly fun game.
Doesn't take itself seriously what so ever.
All though it's a new game it has an awesome blast from the past retro feel to it.

For the asking price, it's a steal.
A LOT of meta humor in there.
All Monkey Island fans should own this game :)

Swords & Crossbones is a fun mix of the tactical RPG and simulation genres. The writng and art design are fun, and the graphics look fine scaled up for the PC. It's another pseudo-retro game, but don't let that keep off this. If you want a well polished (aside from a small typo, i.e. "ahything") game with a fun story, I highly recommend Swords & Crossbones.

Well this is a pretty nice game, I like it, the game isn't perfect and got a few flaws but overall its still a appreciable game, and for the price its still a fairly good game.

Now the main issues I'd say with the game mostly are centered around the resources, you need alot of gold to build your village, upgrade your stuff, craft stuff, etc... but the thing is you get very limited amounts, you'll need to grind to enough and that is one of the unpleasant aspects of the game, you'll need to grind alot for resources to do everything. Heck what make it worse is considering how much you need to do everything the trader where you sell your resources doesn't give you much for them, at least the more basic ones, and same for the Weaponsmith, selling weapons bring very little money, considering how much resources you need to make them its a pretty steep imbalance. I mean seriously you need to do as many side quests \ grind quests as possible and steal as much gold as possible with your thief if you ever want to manage to have enough gold, the rest of the resources isn't so bad but early on at least, gold is Hell to manage.

Now beyond that your character selection is limited, I don't have the feeling you can get 'generic' troops to recruit, if you can I haven't seen it, and yet I am close to 5 hours in. The skills the characters I do have are very limited, at most about 10 skills, a mix of active and passive skills, that you need to invest points in, and that cost every more every upgrades, with this little amount of choices their isn't all that many options for how to level your character up, also one of your starter char seem to have skills that rely on a resource that isn't available for a while, so its pretty useless to invest in anything but the passive in his case. Another one seem to capture beasts to put them in the Zoo, I have yet to see anything I captured in there, so I don't know if its a bug or merely I tried to capture too beasts that require an upgraded zoo to be available. Also the skill progression is fairly limited, my thief got Steal Gold lvl 3, and it gives 56% chances typicall to steal, while Steal Gold lvl 1 gives 50%... at about 3% per upgrade the skill will be effectively useful... about at level 10, problem is its not the only skill you need to get... but however gold is so much an issue... now if you could steal the equipped gear I'd understand 50% or lower rates... but merely for gold... I'd expect it to be a easier to begin with.

Now the Village construction is an interesting aspect the fact you have an entire island to build up is nice, but it cost ALOT to build stuff, to build even the decors cost a bunch, now while I understand in this game the decors have a use, you still have issues managing to get enough resources to build up properly, also it cost like 500 gold to move something, which make any mishaps in setting up your Village and any needs for relocation to be fairly costy.

Now I'll simply say beyond that, that the combat is not the strongest elment of this game, as I said early limited skills available, getting new gear is difficult since it cost so much per item, it means you'll play your characters mostly one way with very little in term of effective variations, you'll also do the same side missions over and over for the sake of grinding those few precious resources early on at least, however I expect later too to a level.

Still even with all the complaining I did about the game, it got a fair amount of charm and is pretty interesting, it combined Tactical RPG with Town Management, its story is quirky and amusing, our party characters seem to be novel and have alot of personality and tend toward being very unique, if albeit in a sort of caricatural \ parodical fashion. Anyhow its even with its flaw still a good game and the developers have shown much willingness to work on it and better it, so they get alot of appreciation from me for being so willing to cooperate with the players and correct the flaws to their game.

EDIT:
Well it seem the developers once again listened, the new update did help with two of the issues I mentioned, namely they reduced the price for moving stuff around, so its now down from 500 gold per move to 200 gold per move, which is nice, I'll be frank I would have prefered more along the line of 50-100 but this is already 60% cheaper, so its a nice drop, its going to help when we need to rearrange the Village for sure. Also they fixed the Zoo issue so now we should be able to capture beasties fine. So thanks to the developers for those fixes. Also they added a 'speed' so that the time on the map can be sped up and thus you can generate resources faster, that should be fairly helpful too to help avoid some of the tedious wait for some of those basic resources build up.

EDIT 2:
So at this point I'd say much of my complains about resources are gone... after trying the game with the Speed Options I noticed it was fairly easy to gather up resources and selling them for gold take care of that, at this point I'd say much of the complains maybe short the combat being too simplistic also maybe the fact that you can't buy equipment and must craft it, maybe there would still be some complain when it comes to resources for crafting being required in too large quantities, at this point dividing all numbers, received and to use for crafting by 10 might have been more sensible than requiring hundreds of items for one piece of gear. Anyhow, oh yea and somehow the Tier 3 Farm cost WAY more to get than the other buildings at this point, is the food resources justifiable of a 3k gold for the upgrade to Tier 3? Along with alot of other resources, it may be overkill. However considering how easy it is to gather up resources with the massive speed boost of x16, it might not matter all that much.

Swords and Crossbones is an interesting game. It's a lot bigger and more indepth than I was origionally thinking it would be. The game's exploration element took me by surprise. Though it has open world elements, I wouldn't really call it an open world game. You can look around but generally you'll only be getting quests on a specific island and if the quest isn't there there's not a reason to be there.

Unlike some people on here I actually like the music. The sound effects are kind of cute but get annoying after awhile. The music is actually one of my favorite parts.

The waiting around for resources can be annoying. It looks like it's based on a lot of those weird freemium games models. Though as this game is something you pay for and there's no reason to wait around I don't know the point of that. However I do rather enjoy the whole building buildings on your own island and setting it up. Moving them around is a bit too expensive but some good planning keeps that from being an issue.

I'm a sucker for tactical rpgs and this seems like a doozy. The early stuff is pretty simple but things start getting more fun once you get off the main island. I think so at least. You start exploring and fighting pirate bosses and that's pretty neat.

The graphics are charming as well. But I grew up in the era this game is kind of mimmicing, so it's right at my heart.

This game is what you pay for. I'd call it a 3.5/5.

Pros: the gameplay is easy to get into, the dialogue is fun, and the mechanics are solid (for the most part)

Cons: the music and sound choices are odd at best and annoying at worst, the game requires a lot in-game waiting to progress, the controls are finicky, and the game has crashed on me three times in nine hours of total play

If the devs fixed the crash issue and it didn't require so much waiting for supplies to fill, I'd like it a lot more.