I recently had the chance of having some hands on time with the upcoming game Pirates: The Key of Dreams by Oxygen Games before it’s release on WiiWare in the UK. WiiWare has several different style of games available ranging from puzzle, action, party and shooter. What it is missing however is a ‘frantic nautical shoot-em-up’ which is luckily, exactly what Pirates: TKOD is.

Running along side the soon to be released DS game Pirates: Duels on the High Seas, the player takes control of a Navy Captain sent deep undercover as a ruthless Pirate, in order to seek out and retrieve The Key of Dreams (one of the seven keys in the DS game), a valuable and dangerous cursed artefact. This takes your ship to several different areas such as Persia, Porto Bello and Porto Royal in 10 levels of single player story. The game looks pretty nice for a WiiWare title, nothing stellar like Crystal Chronicles: MLAK or LostWinds but they are fitting the games style and luckily this translates into a really solid frame rate all the way through the game.

Controls are somewhat fiddly when you first get hands on with the Wiimote, but the team soon told me Wiimote/Nunchuck and Retro Controller were also supported. Using the Wiimote you hold the B trigger to accelerate and left and right on the D-pad to steer your ship (not forgetting being able to hold down which lets you reverse… a ship) the 1 and 2 buttons are assigned to special and normal weaponry, normal being cannonballs out either side of the ship and special being a choice of several power ups such as sea mines, flamethrowers, rockets and my favourite the skim shot (a big circular saw). I’m happy to report the ships movement and response to the controls are top notch not to mention the weaponry which may seem a little odd for the setting, work pretty nicely.

In our play test, we got the chance to play a couple of levels available in single player. Before the level begins you choose your difficulty setting which not only changes enemies but also changes your ship and its speed as well as how much damage it can take, on easy you have a slower, larger ship but it can handle a good amount of fighting. The opposite can be said of the hard ship which is tiny and super quick but can’t take too much damage. First we played through the basic tutorial explaining weaponry and extra items such as the ability to repair your ship (if you have the gold for it) and set sail which allows your ship to move faster and then moved onto a later level which had us destroying ports and exploding boats.

While the single player has 10 levels, the multiplayer has over 30 maps and is by far the highlight of the game. You can play with friends or bots and have a standard all on all deathmatch with various options such as items and frag limit. In our hands on we played a few matches of 4 player deathmatch and its safe to say you and some friends could easily spend a while playing this. Rather than play split screen the multiplayer is done on one map with the camera moving in and out which could be considered to some extent similar to the Smash Bros side on view. This means the maps are fairly small (as multiplayer maps go) but this is probably for the best to keep the action constant and the player on edge rather than chasing people around a suspiciously empty map.

Closing Comments

We walked away the hands on fairly impressed with one of the UK WiiWare games. It may not be the best game we’ve ever seen, but the addictive gameplay has us engrossed and enjoying our time. There are areas that could use improvement, online is almost screaming out to be used in some fashion wether it be co-op story mode or multiplayer, customizable ships and more options/modes in multiplayer would also be great to keep players coming back. This gamer is excited about playing this game with some friends and if it comes out at the right price it could be a big hit.

Although Oxygen Games couldn’t confirm the price of the title we did get told the game would be out in the ‘release window’ of Wiiware (that’s industry speak for ‘within the next few weeks’)