Fugdale’s Funhouse

Review: Ahoy Matey! Grab your eye patch and parrot and take up arms as you command your very own pirate ship out on the seven seas. This elegantly designed game puts you right in the middle of a pirate ship battle. You get a bird’s eye view of the ocean and your ship. Beautiful water effects and clouds rolling by add to the ambience, as do the sounds of seagulls and a creaking ship. Steer your ship about the ocean playfield and fire your cannons to attack enemy ships. The enemy ships float into view one at a time (at first) and you must maneuver your ship so that you can fire cannons off of either side. You can choose which direction to fire (up or down) by toggling the V Key.

Use the space bar to fire all your available cannons at once and tiny black bullets will spew off the side of your ship toward the nearest enemy ship. Each ship has four number statistics next to it. The top number is how much gold the ship carries; next is the integrity of the ship (hit points); then the number of cannons the ship has ready to fire and finally the number of pirates on board. You must also watch your own statistics at the bottom of the screen. Make sure you maintain at least one pirate or the game will end. If you get close to a ship, you can dispense with firing cannons and go into hand to hand combat mode, in which case the ships will turn red and you will see the number of pirates dwindling as they battle away.

As you sink each enemy ship, you collect all the gold on board. After you have destroyed all enemy ships on each level you will proceed to a store full of pirate booty upgrades; which include a faster moving ship; a faster turning ship, more pirates, more cannons, faster reloads and other fun upgrades to help you out. The game proceeds in the nature of a simple RPG, in which you mostly do the same thing over and over to gain more gold and increase the strength of your ship.

I found the design of the game to have very appropriate graphics, mechanics and sound effects. The transitions between levels are smooth and fun to watch, but the game starts to hit the same one note repeatedly early on and I found too much randomness at play in determining which ship will prevail in a battle. Aim is important and holding off firing until you have a good shot will decrease your chances of firing off all your cannons prematurely. Also, strategic purchases between levels provide much of the strategy in the game. But, once out on the waters, you have little more to do than move about and shoot at ships and the game loses some of its steam after a few minutes of playing.

Like all the games reviewed at the Fun House, you will find something fun about this game and it’s definitely worth playing It will surely provide lots of fun for a certain cross section of gamers, so give it a shot and let everyone know how far you get in our comments section.