Buccaneers: Shipshape by Merso Entertainment
Making a truly “retro” game is harder than a lot of developers seem to think. We’re well into an absolute deluge of games trying to recapture the magic of the titles many of us grew up on, and in many cases, that ends up generating games that nail the aesthetic but not the feel. There are exceptions, of course, but there’s no shortage of games that seem to think “old school” experiences start and end with pixel art and a CRT filter.
So it is that I was very excited when, a few minutes into Buccaneers: Shipshape, my immediate thought was “they get it.” This game doesn’t just look like a forgotten ’90s arcade game, it plays like one, too. And it plays like one of the really good ones.
Big Ship, Little Ship
The dread pirate Captain Winters has stolen your ship and treasure map. Are you a bad enough dude, dudette, or anything in between to get your treasure back?
With a simple setup and a choice of four different characters, Buccaneers drops you into its world with one goal: beat the living snot out of any pirates that stand between you and your booty. While based on an old arcade game from the ’80s (that was itself a hack of the game Vigilante), the obvious inspiration it draws upon for the gameplay is Konami‘s arcade output from the ’90s, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or X-Men.
The game evokes that influence in spades. The hacking and slashing is all very simple but feels tight to control and punchy, helped tremendously by the fact that each of the characters feels very different to play. The levels are also nicely varied and have some cool touches, like a rooftop level in the rain where your characters are constantly sliding towards the edge.
If there’s a place it deviates from its inspirations, it’s that this game absolutely swarms you with enemies, which initially caught me off guard but actually got me to use things like my special attacks and summonable parrot companion, which are things I would normally hoard in other games and never use.
Oh, and before you ask, yes, there’s up to four-player couch co-op. Heck, the devs went a step further and even included the original arcade game.
Questing Upon the Poop Deck
I know I started this review saying that retro games are more than just visuals, but it’s also worth noting when the visuals complement the experience perfectly, which is absolutely the case with Buccaneers.
The spritework, animations, backgrounds, and cut-scenes are all spot-on for the era the game is aiming for, and the music by DMLEDO is full of bangers that sound straight out of games like Sunset Riders. There were some character animations that actually made me laugh out loud.
The game does have some downsides, but for the most part, they’re nitpicks. The regular enemies that get added to boss fights sometimes feel like a bit too much, some of the hazard sections where you’re dodging obstacles feel like they’re going on just a bit too long, and I wish there was more variety to the enemies you fight (though this actually gets remedied in the game’s later stages).
In all honesty, the only major complaint I have is the lack of being able to access the Options menu in the game’s pause screen, which made playing around with the game’s many visual filters to get an authentic ’90s feel a bit more annoying than it needed to be. For the record, I recommend the Scanlines TV2X filter.
The Verdict
All this is to say that Buccaneers: Shipshape absolutely feels like a ’90s arcade beat-’em-up, one that maybe didn’t get as much attention as its big license brothers, but years later you’d ask a friend, “Hey, did you ever play this game?” and they’d go, “Oh YEAH! I forgot about that one! That game was sweet!”
If that doesn’t sell you on it, nothing will.
Buccaneers: Shipshape is available via Steam.
Watch the trailer for Buccaneers: Shipshape below: