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6.1 sorta fun
It's sometime in the early seventeenth century and you are Lucy Tuttle, tomboy head-strong daughter of an executive working for the East India Trading Company near Biscayne Bay at the mouth of the Miami River. Threatened with finishing school by your step-mother, you sneak aboard a ship and set out to find your father for a second opinion. The only problem is that dear old dad seems to have disappeared somewhere in the Bahamas, and his coworkers are acting quite suspiciously. Before you can say "shiver me timbers," you've replaced your girly lace traveling gown with a seaman's breeches, three-cornered hat, and admiral's coat as you sail into a life of piracy on the high seas!
Pirate Princess, from MoonPod, is a word game that challenges you to quickly construct words from a group of letters. Much like Bookworm Adventures, each encounter with an enemy is settled the old-fashioned way: with a "spell-off."
In this game being a pirate apparently means preying on other pirates, as I didn't see Lucy attacking any merchant vessels. (Pirate code dictates that pirates don't ask about other pirates, but skirmishing with them is perhaps okay.) It seems the Caribbean is so infested with them that it's just easier to let them come to you rather than take time running down a trading ship.
Outside of battles, most of the game is played out on a large map of the Bahamas and Caribbean Sea. Waypoints dot the map and navigation lines run between them. Some waypoints are ports, which can be sailed to directly. Others are simple dots you must sail through to get to your destination port. At either of these, pirates and other encounters appear and disappear. Moving from one side of the Bahamas to the other, for example, may require engaging a handful of enemies. These as well as Lucy are all visible on the map as tiny ship and character torso icons. Clicking on a port anywhere on the map will automatically raise anchor and set Lucy's ship heading full sails ahead for that location. Clicking on the sea and dragging the mouse allows you to scroll around the map.
Missions, such as making deliveries or finding your father, give you a goal as you sail about the map. Yellow question marks indicate a new mission is available at that port, while green exclamation points announce a location you need to visit in order to advance the plot. Dialogue windows portray conversations between Lucy and characters she meets, with some multiple choice action every now and then to give the story a small feel of interaction.
During battles your ship's cannons fire each time you spell a word using any of the nine random letters at your disposal. Clicking on letters (or typing them at the keyboard) spells a word and then clicking "FIRE" (or hitting the Enter key) lights the gunpowder! The longer the word and the more rare the letters in it, the more damage your attack will do. Each time you use a letter in a word, it's replaced with another one. The game is fairly accurate in its attempt to always give you a healthy mix of vowels and popular consonants like R, S, and T. If you can't find a word among the letters given to you, you can replace them with nine new random letters, though your ship will take some damage in this manuever. This contest between pirate and pirate isn't turn-based; both ships fire on each other as fast as they can until one is listing helplessly, masts down and aflame.
Powerup coins are available during battle to repair some damage to your ship, temporarily increase your attack strength or defenses, shuffle an opponent's letters, steal his powerups, give extra letters to words, find stronger words, and so on. You can carry a maximum of eight of these coins at a time. These are either bought at markets or earned as the spoils of victory. They can be traded between ports for profit, as prices differ between marketplaces.
In a nod to Bookworm Adventures, words that are just the least bit piratey, such as "rum" or "sea" or "pillage," do extra damage and help charge up six bonus broadside cannons on your ship. These cannons remain charged up between encounters and can be devestating against stronger enemies. (I was a bit disappointed when some words I thought should be included, such as "keel," didn't result in a stronger pirate attack bonus.)
Do well in battle and you'll gain gold and experience points that can be used to purchase ship repairs (or a new, better ship entirely), and skill points to increase your prowess during a skirmish.
Three difficulty levels are included. I must confess that I found Pirate Princess very difficult on the normal setting, and wasn't able to make it past the first powerful enemy. Perhaps I wasn't using my powerups or broadsides as efficiently as possible. Luckily, you can change between difficulty levels at any time, which is exactly what I did. In easy mode I still had a hard time with enemies that employ constant letter-locking and letter-scrambling powerups against Lucy. I'm pretty good at finding simple words like "cat" and "tea" but those don't do any damage to stronger enemies... and just when I'd find a good world like "impulse," a bearded brigand would lock out my i. Curse you, bearded brigand!
The graphics in Pirate Princess aren't much to look at, to be honest. I liked the character potraits, especially Lucy's, but it seemed like this game was assembled from a mixture of styles. It lacks uniformity. The map view suffers the most, with static squared off cutouts floating about and what looks like programmer art announcing the appearance and disappearance of pirates. The image of Lucy being blasted out of a losing battle is particularly bad. The sound effects, like the graphics, lack consistency but at least make up for it in flavor. There are a lot of creaking hulls and ocean waves as you sail between ports. The background music on the other hand is wonderfully epic and exactly the sort of track you don't want to listen to looping again and again. Luckily it can be muted.
One very annoying bug finds letters typed on the keyboard during battle sometimes not recognized! I'm no touch typist but I really had to slow down my pace at the keyboard... frustrating indeed since during battle the more attacks you can get in, the better. Frequently I ended up typing "MOSE" instead of "MOUSE" or "WIM" instead of "WHIM" because the game didn't catch one of my keypresses.
Who knows, maybe Lucy is an ascendant of Julia Tuttle, the Cleveland native who founded the city of Miami? There's only one way to find out!