Shantae and the Pirates curse is a game that will bring back memories of the old school Mario/Nintendo DS games with all the classic noises and fast bouncing characters, however it’s playable on the Xbox one. This is an adventure style puzzle game that is based on finding new things and making your character better with new abilities.
This is a typical jump and explore style game. The graphics are supposed to be retro style to give you that classic feeling also being very vivid and light. There is a good balance between fighting and jumping to new places and puzzle solving. This is a very fast paced game that makes you feel as if you need to speed play the game. The bosses are challenging and puzzles are hard but they offer a good challenge.
The story is about a woman who was once a genie who is trying to adapt back into society and become a normal human being. Shantae runs into some friends and discovers that her home town called scuttle was being attacked and she now needs to defend its glory and discover its’ Ammo Barron in his tank (the mechanized military mad man) that are taking it over. You use jewels that you have collected from killing the bosses and other creatures to buy goods and new items for your character. The weapons that you buy and come across definitely have a unique style to this game.
When you read about what is happening with the town that feeling nostalgia takes over because all the text brackets are filled with that classic font and super speedy writing, straight out of a Nintendo.
You soon discover that risky boots is Shantae’s arch nemeses Risky boots has accused Shantae of all these wrong doings and traps here in a bathtub and sets and evil curse on her!
You need to save your town and collect jewels on the way!!
You need to defeat the area bosses then you can move on to the next challenge that waits. I can’t spoil all the good stuff!
The saves are really far apart to make it more challenging, so be careful on what you do.
The 6 different islands give a nice change instead of one large map, which makes it roughly 10 to 12 hours long, which also allows for change of scenery and moods. It helps eliminate the consistent repetitive monotonous music and general gameplay. Each island has a new enemies and challenges
Some of the things I don’t like about this game are that it hurts your eyes after a while. Not all the characters speak so it changes the perception of the people. The graphics and the reading font size cause you to strain your eyes because there is so much writing, with all this writing it takes time away from the gameplay, and when you want to get right back into the action to try again you need to skip through all the dialogue after reading it for the 10th time. The gameplay makes you feel as if you are almost forced to play it at a rapid rate; it’s not so good for people who are new comers to the genre. It also doesn’t give people much background to what happened previously and just throws you into the game, Also there are very few controller helps, no tutorial, so you need to button mash to work out what button does what.
The genre of game is very entertaining for people who have come up playing games on the classic Nintendo’s and who really enjoy the retro 2D games, however I am struggling to be entertained and consistently play as a new comer to the genre.
It’s a well-built game that runs smoothly and doesn’t show any signs of lag or any other faults. The game music is entertaining and changes through some of the scenes and islands.
Way Forward Technologies really have done a superb job with this game!