Corsair Cove

Corsair Cove was provided by Hooded Horse for review. Thank You!

I have to admit, it's been some time since I last played a pirate strategy game, let alone a pirate city builder, but Corsair Cove might be the best reintroduction I could have hoped for. Whether you like city-building or just pirates in general, you'll probably find the game appealing thanks to a mixture of gameplay and the great setting the game is based in.

Corsair Cove is a game of two halves. The first half is the city building, and as far as city builders go, it's not too unique. Your buildings primarily serve as housing and production, with a few "special" buildings here and there that you can use to your advantage in certain situations.

Where you can build is perhaps the most unique part of this half of the game, in that you can construct your buildings just about anywhere. Place a building on the side of a cliff, and you'll create a platform that you can build a lift or a ladder up to. This is a great feature, as it means you can fit far more buildings on your island than you otherwise might think. And that's needed, as you only get one island that you can build on.

The production chains in the game are deep enough where you'll need to consider them when laying out your base, but not deep enough to overwhelm or frustrate players. Plus, the game highlights which buildings rely on each other when you place them, and will warn you if you're placing a building too far away from another in the chain, thus making it inefficient for the workers to transport resources, a very appreciated feature that should be a standard in this genre.

You will also occasionally get attacked by "The Crown", the game's primary antagonistic faction. They'll launch assaults on your pirate haven, requiring you to have defensive structures (supplied with ammo) around your island to fight back their ships, and this leads us into the second half of the game: the ship gameplay.

This is arguably more exciting than the city building aspect of the game, and fortunately, both run side-by-side. Once you get your first ship, you'll be able to send it off to various Points of Interest around the map, all the while continuing your city management as it sails, and once it's arrived, you can start an event to (hopefully) get some booty!

Sometimes the event is a simple pickup of goods; other times it may be a battle or some other challenge that must be overcome. In the event of a battle (or challenge), you'll have to balance the resources of your ship (health, crew, and supplies) against your opponents, playing different cards to deal damage to your opponent, while keeping your own ship afloat. The difficulty errs on the easy side, perhaps too easy, and you are made aware of what stats your ship should have before you begin an event.

I loved this mix of two mechanics; the city-building is exciting to see your base expand across the island, while your fleet is out exploring the oceans and uncovering new islands, factions, and events. Interwoven between both of these is the game's progression system, in the form of a large tech tree.

The tech tree is unlocked by performing "deeds", which are various tasks you can accomplish, each one giving you a point to spend on the tech tree to make your colony better. This was my favorite part of the game, and there's plenty to unlock; they really nailed the progression in Corsair Cove, giving you plenty to do while introducing fun, bite-sized tasks to the game.

Finally, the story of Corsair Cove isn't much to write home about. It's there; it gives a reason for you to be doing the quests you're doing, but it does feel as though it's been pretty hastily put together, and for the subject matter (pirates), the story is on the light-hearted, sometimes comedic side of things. It only pops up here and there when completing specific quests, and it was pretty much a non-factor to me.

Corsair Cove was generally bug-free, although I did have an instance where my ship could travel through solid objects, thus cutting down travel time quite markedly.

Corsair Cove - Steam Deck Performance

Corsair Cove supports 1280x800 as a resolution, but it does not have controller support, so you'll need to use the Keyboard (WASD) + Mouse layout or a community-created layout to control the game.

Performance is quite bad at the default settings, with constant sub-30 FPS. Lower all the quality settings to their lowest, then switch the Upscaling to AMD FSR and set it to Quality. Limit the framerate to 30 FPS using the in-game settings, then go into your Quick Access Menu and force a manual GPU clock of 1600MHz; this helps keep the framerate much more stable.

With these settings, you can expect the early game (the first couple of hours) to maintain 30 FPS, but as you expand your base, the CPU demands become greater, meaning the CPU and GPU vie for the Steam Deck's power. Unfortunately, this does mean that mid-sized bases will drop you into the mid-20s, and towards the latter stages of the game, to around 20, regardless of graphical settings. Given the slow-paced, managerial nature of the game, that may still be playable depending on what you can tolerate.

There is an option for Frame Generation, but the input lag is unpleasant, even in a strategy setting.

Because Corsair Cove pushes the Steam Deck almost the entire time, expect a power draw of around 18-21W regardless of what you're doing. This means battery life is on the lower side, around 2.5 Hours on a Steam Deck OLED, and around 1.5 Hours on a Steam Deck LCD. Temperatures were largely staying around 70C.

Accessibility:

Corsair Cove does have subtitles for its voiced lines; it also has UI scaling which defaults to the max of 250% on the Steam Deck. The text is still a little hard to read in places, but it's OK. There are also color blind filters.

Conclusion:

Corsair Cove cleverly combines city building with seafaring exploration and alternates enough to prevent either from getting stale. With a beautiful environment combined with a sizable tech tree, there's plenty to keep you entertained here.

Steam Deck performance isn't where I'd like it to be. It's so close to being a 30 FPS experience, but as your base expands, the CPU demands start to become too much for the Steam Deck to handle. The controls also require some slight configuration to be at their best. You'd be best playing Corsair Cove on a desktop PC or laptop.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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