Free MMORPG Round Up

Pirate Galaxy

Anyone that’s played EVE Online will be familiar with the thrill of flying around the galaxy in a customised space ship and blowing shiz up. Even if you haven’t played EVE, the mental imagery painted by the thought of flying around, looting, pillaging and gunning down stuff in a space ship will appeal to many gamers. The first time you fire up Pirate Galaxy though, it’s not quite so glamorous or exhilarating.

As you might suspect, your rookie space craft is no Imperial Star Destroyer. However, the problem isn’t so much the hardware as the way the ship minces around, hovering at what appears to be about 4ft from the ground. Your vessel automatically turns to fly in another direction when it comes to contact with any part of the landscape so there’s little need to become an accomplished pilot. You can’t control the pitch though, which means that for all intents and purposes, you may as well be piloting a land speeder rather than a space ship. You're left feeling very detached from the piloting of your space craft and feel more like some benign overseer jabbing a finger in the direction in which you want it to fly.

Being an MMORPG, Pirate Galaxy has all the usual elements of the genre. Ranks can be gained through earning experience points, which are earned by completing missions and killing foes which drop currency which can be spent on upgrading your gear. Missions are acquired from a local space station in orbit around a planet, and each one involves entering the atmosphere to skim along the surface and kill or collect stuff.


There’s a shortcut bar, much like those seen in many fantasy MMOs, so taking down an enemy is a matter of targeting it and then hitting the shortcut buttons to execute your attack skills. The process is slow, monotonous and a long way from the exhilarating thrill ride that gunning down an enemy craft in a space ship should be. The lack of player input to the piloting of the space ship is a real drag in combat.

Pirate Galaxy is very well presented for a free game though. There's respectable use of lighting techniques and the graphics are of a standard reminiscent of the Sega Dreamcast. For this reason, you’ll need something resembling a semi-decent GPU to run it smoothly at high resolutions. This is another game that pays its way on a micro-transaction system but again, it’s not an essential part of the game.

Conclusion

Clearly a lot of effort has gone into Pirate Galaxy, but it fails to deliver on the fundamental points. The combat is simply boring and the way the endless teems of automated enemy drones randomly meander about the combat zones feels very contrived. At least if they were rabbits and deer they might be there to nom on the grass. Throw in a bunch of poorly explained interface help boxes and we can’t imagine many people would stick Pirate Galaxy out for any length of time. It’s nice to see something a bit different from the wash of carbon-copy fantasy MMORPGs that are available for free, but Pirate Galaxy simply isn’t very good.