Skyrates
*Signature Selection* - Today’s Free Game Signature Selection titles are the best of the best. Despite being completely free, they’re as good (or better) than many of the retail games that sell for $10, $30, or sometimes even $60. They’re longer, display more polish, and have more heart than the vast majority of free games out there, and MUST be played.
Genre: Massively Multiplayer Online Tailspin-esque Game
Platform: Browser (Primarily Flash)
Developed by: Team Skyrates
Play Now!
The Scoop: Skyrates is an air pirate-themed realtime MMOG. The basic hook in this and other similar titles is that doing much of anything takes a long, long time. In Skyrates after you’ve signed up for your account and ran through basic training, you’re turned loose in the world to earn your fortune by trading, hunting down air pirates, or completing missions. But flying from your starting island to its neighbor to make your first trade takes about 90 real world minutes.
In the beginning, when you’re most excited about the game, this realtime pacing can be frustrating. There simply won’t be anything for you to do more often than once an hour (if that). But eventually, the idea is that gamers will be able to fall into a routine of what the Skyrates Team refers to as “sporadic play.” Skyrates isn’t something you can sit and spend 30 straight minutes with, but it is something you can check on several times throughout the day, to see how your little air captain is progressing.
The team has built in various mechanics that help facilitate this “twice daily” play style. You can queue up elaborate action lists for your pirate, like telling him to travel to Island A and buy 100 Ore, then travel to Island B and sell the Ore, then buy 100 Grog and then sell that and island C, etc. As you progress you gain the ability to lengthen your queue. I’ve been playing for about a month now, and can queue up a full 24 hours’ worth of actions. The next time I log in, I’m present with a log of everything that transpired, while I was away.
The main difference between Skyrates and it’s other realtime MMO peers is that Skyrates runs off of a flash client, and isn’t just in-browser text-based. In most titles when you go to battle you’ll get a text readout of what transpired (example: “Your armada defeated player B’s and sustained X% damage”) – the game is just crunching various combat and economic formulas.
But in Skyrates, combat and trading is handled like a real game. In combat you control your plane’s movement and speed with the arrow keys, and can perform maneuvers such as barrel rolls and loops with the numpad.
The game itself is very addicting, and has multiple reward loops running to keep you coming back for more. As you earn money via trading profits or pirate bounties, you’ll be able to trade in your old plane for one that’s faster, has a greater range/top speed, more cargo space, and other improvements. As a trader, I spend a lot of time salivating over that next big upgrade to the size of my cargo hold.
Additionally, you can upgrade your pirates skills by spending his or her accumulated Flight, Trade, and Combat points. Like plane purchases, you’re never far away from having enough points to boost your max flight range, or your gun accuracy in combat.
My addiction is probably also fueled by the fact that I adore the setting. Any game with floating islands and air buccaneers more-or-less automatically earns a place high on my “games to watch” list. Less compelling was the decision to make all the races humanoid animals. I picked the walrus-looking fellow you can see above, but most of the races came off as very furry-esque – an observation that hit close to home when I wandered into the Skyrates Roleplay chatroom one evening (no joke).
My addiction to games of this type normally follows a pretty predictable arc – I become addicted and check in on my progress several times daily, until I’m forced to spend some time offline by work/vacation/whatever. When I get back, I never resume playing and can’t recall why I found the experience so compelling in the first place. Will Skyrates be the game to break this cycle? Who can say. All I know is that for now, I’m happily heading towards sky-island Tortuga to load up on crates of diamonds – they’re being sold at a great price.
(11 votes, average: 3.55 out of 5)
Loading ...
Links:
Wikia Wiki
JayIsGames Write-Up
Developer Postmortem
Rock, Paper, Shotgun Write-Up
Comments
2 Responses to “Skyrates”
Leave a Reply
Loading ...
Cool game. I used to enjoy a few games like this–Utopia was one, can’t remember the other ones. This is a little nicer, with some graphical flourish, just enough action, and a cool theme. I think it’s meant to be Talespin-esque, but you’re right, the chat rooms can get a bit… furry. :/
Anyway, good so far, but I’ll wait a little bit to give it a star rating.
Huh, I must have subconsciously read “Tailspin-esque” at the top and copied that.
Final verdict–somewhat addictive and reasonably fun MMO game, but not a lot of depth. Kind of an Escape Velocity-lite, except everything takes forever.
Trying to play it took up too much time, so I tried to delete my account… but there’s no way to do it. So I sabotaged my character instead. Poor bastard’s stuck on a rock somewhere.