Looking for a hypercute game of pirating and plunder? No? Well, Psygnosis has brought us one anyway: Shipwreckers, a stunning-looking piece of work loaded with cuddly pirate trappings, humorous enemies and weapons, and bizarre power-ups. Though not the most thought-provoking game, its design is certainly original and is executed with graphical ingenuity.
It's essentially a third-person arcade-style shooter where you sail the high seas - well, OK, more like the high lake, since the initial levels' bodies of water are entirely surrounded by land, but no matter - battling other pirate vessels and destroying the gun turrets and flamethrowers (on a pirate ship?) of defending ports in an attempt to spread your swashbuckling reign of terror. All right, actually the worst you ever do to these places is bring down their two-colored flags and replace them with a Jolly Roger. At your disposal is stranger weaponry than Bluebeard ever used, from simple cannonballs to mines, oil slicks, and the occasional antiaircraft rocket. In addition, weird temporary power-ups spice things up, like the "instant blimp" that pulls in your sails and "grows" a blimp from atop the mainmast (an amazing animation, incidentally) allowing you to float over obstacles, temporarily above the enemy, out of harm's way.
With bomb-dropping parrots, exploding fish, and cutesy Raggedy Anne pirates morbidly afloat in the water after jumping ship, Shipwreckers' design is refreshing and funny. The water effects are incredible, from the glint of light off the waves, to the shadows of airborne predators, to the amazing transparency effects. When enemy ships are sunk they remain visible in their watery graves, a few feet beneath the surface - an offbeat synthesis of depressive peg-legged fatalism and cartoonish goofiness that sets the tone for the rest of the game. The only real design flaw is that the backgrounds and perspectives sometimes make it hard to see what you're doing. Frequently, when you're in a really narrow causeway, you can't see yourself over the hedgelike rows of beach flora. Sure, there are three different perspectives, but when you're fleeing electric squid through giant rotating buzz saws, there really isn't time to toggle camera angles.
Initially, control seems pretty easy. Movementwise, all you have to deal with is rotating on a center axis and moving forward. There is no reverse, no strafing, and (obviously) no jumping. When you get into combat, things get a little sticky. Your primary method of attack is with cannonballs. You can either fire one shot dead ahead or a cluster of four to the port or starboard sides. So, you're continually lining up your spinning vessel with your enemies either dead-on or to the left or right. If it were easier to switch the type of cannon shot, this would be a snap, but the game only has one attack button. It uses the L2 and R2 buttons to spin a small onscreen weapon-select wheel, and by the time you get anywhere in the game, you've picked up enough other (stylistically cool, but less effective) weapons that the two types of cannon shots are several clicks away. Most people will just settle on one type of shot and spend a lot of time bearing down on the enemy, firing off a few misses, taking a long time to turn around, and making another pass. Oddly, the enemy AI seems to freak out sometimes and drive its ships into the shore, leaving them easy targets, stationary, with their guns pointed away from you. Weird.
After a bit of time, the initial novelty of the game's look and design dulls slightly, as the shortcomings of the combat interface become more apparent. Sure, the later levels have amazing new looks. Storm clouds gather, the world falls into twilight, and you pick up a strange new weapon that allows you to hurl lightning. But the essentials of the game remain the same throughout, making it great for an arcade-style afternoon or two but without any big payoffs for your long-term dedication.
