I’m quite picky when it comes to VR games, but Pirates VR: Jolly Roger immediately drew me in with its visuals and promising premise. Although the first impressions were positive, the game ultimately proved to be somewhat disappointing. This indie VR action-adventure game takes you on a search for Davy Jones’ treasure on a dangerous, remote island. Combining climbing, puzzle-solving, combat, and exploration, the game offers a short but visually impressive pirate experience. However, despite the beautiful environments and functional mechanics, the combat, puzzles, and story leave a lot of room for improvement.
The game begins with a brief tutorial covering basic gameplay mechanics, such as healing, inventory management, and carrying gold. Unfortunately, the first hour of the game feels repetitive, mostly focused on climbing, parkour, and free exploration. While I appreciated the freedom of movement, I often felt lost. The game desperately needs better hints or clearer navigation guidance. There is also a ridiculous parrot that either insults you or vaguely points you in the right direction; in other words, its help is inconsistent.
The climbing and exploration in the game are quite enjoyable. Grabbing onto rocks, trees, and vines to reach new areas was surprisingly fun and left me wanting more of those moments. Luckily, the developers seem to have noticed this, as there is a special climbing challenge in the game that you can unlock with money, and on which I was happy to spend a lot of time. The beautiful visuals further make the game stand out as a good VR title. From sunny beaches to dark dungeons, the environments are truly well-crafted.
As previously mentioned, the first part of the gameplay heavily relies on climbing, with repetitive sequences that later give way to more varied mechanics. This means you can use a pistol and a lamp, both conveniently located on your hips. The pistol is used to defend against enemies, while the lamp helps illuminate dark areas. The mechanic of manually refilling the lamp with oil introduces a small but interesting resource management aspect.
The combat in the game is disappointing. It’s limited to basic shooting or swinging an axe, and the lack of weapon variety—there isn’t even a sword—takes away from the excitement of a pirate experience. The skeleton enemies are not diverse, and the combat itself feels unimpressive and lacks a sense of reward. The puzzles are also straightforward, mostly boiling down to interacting with the environment or searching for hidden items.
One bright spot is the engaging main boss sequence, which keeps you tense and requires you to use everything you’ve learned up to that point. Although the story is quite linear, there is some freedom of exploration. You can find skeletons with bags of money or discover hidden treasures that need to be manually opened, which adds that special feeling of discovery where you want to explore as much as possible.
However, the lack of specific VR mechanics for swimming, relying instead on analog stick control, feels like a missed opportunity for greater immersion. Still, since swimming is not a major part of the game, this is not a huge drawback. Sometimes it was nice to simply slow down, explore at my own pace, and figure things out along the way.
The game ran smoothly on high settings on my PC, with no stuttering or frame rate drops, and it offers various accessibility options for adjusting head and stick movement. Although it can feel a bit clunky until you get used to it, overall, the game functions without major issues.
Considering the price, Pirates VR: Jolly Roger is a carefully designed experience that fails to fully immerse you in the world of pirates. Still, despite its short length (four hours), it’s a quality-crafted game with a lot of enjoyable moments. Polished and meaningfully developed VR games don’t come out every day, and this one is certainly worth trying. It introduces interesting VR mechanics, and the overall experience is worth your time; just don’t expect anything spectacular.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Beautiful graphics and beautiful environments. | Simple puzzles and combat. |
| Interesting VR mechanics. | A linear experience with no real guidance. |
| A fun pirate adventure theme. | Short game. |
| No hiccups or bugs. | Enemies are not intuitive. |
Review copy provided by the publisher
3.6
