Corsair Cove is as stylish a city builder as any pirate could hope for

Upon hearing a description, you might think that Corsair Cove is a conventional city building game with a quirky theme: pirates. You start the game by founding a pirate base on an island, surround it with houses, and then attempt to keep everyone happy by keeping their need for food (and grog, obviously) met.

But Corsair Cove is positively dripping with style, to the point where you need to see it to really drink in the atmosphere. Buildings and beds don’t just rest kindly on the ground here; they’re embedded into the sides of cliffs, with facilities loosely connected via rope bridges and prayer. At the start, it just looks like the controlled chaos you might expect from what is essentially a criminal gang. But just a few hours in, you’ll be so up to your eyes in rope pulleys, taverns, and gold that you’ll feel transported to another time and place.

The first and most obvious gimmick you'll encounter in Corsair Cove is that you can build up into the cliff faces, instead of being restricted to land. The game is packed with inventive systems like this that all build towards an expansive scope.

See, in addition to just managing a pirate cove and ensuring you’re making the most out of the island’s natural resources, you’re also sailing the seven seas to find new pirates to join your crew, completing quests to increase your notoriety, and, of course, collecting booty.

This marriage of exploration and base building creates a fantastic ecosystem, with each feeding into the other. By completing tasks — like doing events with certain captains or having multiple taverns with efficient booze supplies — you'll gain perk points that you can spend to unlock new buildings or upgrades. Oftentimes, these upgrades will help you fulfill even more tasks, like giving you an elevator building that makes transporting goods to high or low places that much faster. Unlocking multiple perks in the same tree awards you a different kind of ship you can make, which will then allow you to push further into the sea and complete more tasks.

Shortly after the tutorial, when the game first let me loose, it introduced me to its elaborate quest system. But the quests require ships much stronger than the ones I had access to. I thought it would take hours to complete my first step, and was a little deflated.

When I looked at the buildings I'd unlocked, however, I saw I was now able to brew my own rum. Once I set up that operation and had a nice supply, I was able to replace my basic ship’s crew with a more advanced one — one that ran on good old Captain Morgan rather than the basic stuff. Having a full crew of well-equipped members boosted my stats enough that I was able to easily clear that first mission within a hour, and this began my loop of juggling all of the different pieces of pirate pie Corsair Cove had for me.