Pirates VR: Jolly Roger review

On the shores of a Caribbean island lie the remains of a pirate ship, torn asunder by the sea and scattering its riches along the sandy shore. The trail of loot twists deep into the lush jungle landscape and dank caverns, guarded by vicious predators and the reanimated bones of scallywags. Following in the footsteps of the pirates who came before, you and your trusty parrot set sail on a journey of your own to uncover the secrets of the island and discover the lost treasure.

While the game might say pirates on the tin, a lot of the game feels more like treasure hunting than swashbuckling. Much of your time on the island will be spent wandering around through the environment and collecting little bags of coins or looting gold chalices from nooks and crannies. You aren't alone on your adventure either, as you're accompanied by an extremely grating parrot companion that spouts annoying jeers at you throughout the whole game. The bird is intended to help guide you along through the island, but it also never shuts up. And don't even think about trying to shoot it either, like I did; it just leads to an immediate game over, which considering this game's poor autosaving, can set you back considerably for something so trivial.

The island itself is decently interesting to look at, even if the graphics aren't necessarily the best I've ever seen. This is a plus considering the narrative extends simply to just searching for lost pirate treasure, so it was nice to at least have some good scenery. Some of my favorite parts included an underwater cave full of crystals, which has you diving and dashing to pockets of air as you seek the path deeper towards the mysterious hidden treasure. There are some less than stellar sections, like the nearly pitch-black caves in the second chapter, but I do think the varied environments are certainly one of the better parts of the game, especially in the latter half.

Beyond walking and swimming, there is also quite a bit of climbing, which, while novel at first, ended up feeling awkward and not very fluid. Sometimes it will look and feel like you've got a proper handhold, and then the next moment, you're plummeting to your death and starting all the way from the bottom of the cliff. It's a shame considering the swimming was actually decently fun, even if it's a little bit floaty.

Throughout the five chapters of the game, there are also some challenges that you can choose to take on, but they aren't really worth doing considering there is no reward at all. I suppose if you're interested in beating your own high score in a climbing mini-game, you can knock yourself out, but I couldn't care less after the first one I discovered.

When combat was finally introduced in the second half of the game, I almost wished I could go back to a time when it wasn't in the game. The only weapon I had access to was a pistol, which was pretty standard as far as VR weaponry goes. There isn't any depth beyond just aim and shoot, with reloading being done by waving the pistol near the ammo bag on my waist. There is also a duck foot pistol you can find near the end of the game, but it's really only useful for the final boss considering it drains four times the ammo. What is notably lacking here is a sword; I mean what kind of pirate game doesn't let you have a sword? Sure, you can loot one off a skeleton after defeating it, but you can't keep it, and it also breaks in a single hit. This is especially hilarious considering that you use a sword in the menus to point to which options you want to select; why couldn't I use that in normal gameplay too?

Outside of wild animals, the only real enemies were skeletons, who sprint up to you attempting to engage you in melee and can be easily dispatched with the pistol mentioned above. There aren't any interesting ways to interact with these foes, and they were honestly more of an annoyance than an interesting gameplay element. They do get spiced up with additional weapons near the end of the game, but by then it felt just a little too late for it to be meaningful.

Thankfully, it's not all wandering around and fighting, as there are also some light puzzle sections that attempt to shake up the gameplay. These are mostly serviceable for being reasonably fun diversions, but they are rarely if ever challenging. While I understand they probably didn't want to make these barriers to progression, it would have been nice not to have the main character or the parrot give away the solution within seconds of encountering the puzzle. Still, the puzzles tended to be some of the better parts of the experience in spite of it all due to them being one of the only incentives to explore.

Before we wrap things up, I think it's important to also mention that I ran into a wealth of bugs throughout my playthrough. Everything from simple things like the camera jittering around when close to walls and items not being able to be picked up or dropped properly, all the way to near game-breaking issues like my pistol just vanishing from my inventory when reloading my save. There were at least two times I had to revert to an earlier save because I was missing inventory items, which was a huge let down. Just keep in mind that this game is janky at the best of times, and extremely buggy at the worst of times.