Robot Pirates Reviews

Fun and addictive! I've enjoyed playing this game a lot, it's challenging, and yet good, silly fun. I want to marry the mermaid.

Robot Pirates is unrelated to the identically named enemies in Ubisoft's Rayman series of games and it's not apparent that this is any kind of attempt to deliberately infringe on Ubisoft copyrights or trademarks. If you are looking for a Rayman game, this is not one of them, while it is easy to be mislead just from the title. That out of the way, what is it? Well, it's a completely garbage GameMaker Studio endless runner/platformer hybrid. While you have some agency in how you move around, there's a big wave that chases you, so you must inevitably run to the right of your screen or you die (although another way to avoid the wave is to delete the game, I recommend this approach). Lacklustre game concept is married perfectly to a completely garbage quality technical implementation. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The artwork here is terrible, it's a blend of old retro pixel "art" used as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics, and some of the most amateurish MS-Paint style drawings I've ever hurt my eyes on. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget to arrange someone who can do graphics properly, or lack of talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result of these decisions. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Robot Pirates is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.