An Anno with legendary pirates and my own Tortuga? Yes please! And just such a game has now been announced: Corsair Cove sets sail for Steam. MyMMO editor Benedict Grothaus was allowed to take an early look during our FYNG show.
It feels a bit like I just landed in an alternate timeline. The last really good pirate game I remember was Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag from 2013. And sure, Sea of Thieves is cool, but it’s not my thing.
Then came Windrose, a sandbox game that captures the pirate feeling excellently and I can hardly tear myself away from it. That’s somewhat of a problem, because Corsair Cove is now also in my Steam library, grinning at me with a hook hand and an eye patch…
The pitch I received for the building game was: “Pirate Anno.” Anno is exactly the building game I don’t like that much, but after recently getting back into the genre through City Tales, I wanted to check out Corsair Cove. Luckily.
As part of Find Your Next Game CAGGTUS, the joint show of Webedia assets, the creators then invited us to an exclusive playtest. Now I know that Corsair Cove has little to do with Anno and that’s exactly what makes it so good.
Corsair Cove offers what all pirates strive for: freedom
I don’t want to delve too much into the standard features of Corsair Cove. It’s a building game, so you build shelters for your pirates and provide them with food, alcohol, and whatever else pirates need. There are resources and production chains – everything familiar. Colleague Fabiano Uslenghi has published a more detailed article on the features of Corsair Cove on GameStar.
What makes Corsair Cove so special now is the “build anywhere” philosophy that the developers explain in the interview. Instead of a flat building area for ruler-straight roads, the pirate game lets me build anywhere, even and especially on mountain slopes.
As a result, my city doesn’t just grow horizontally but also vertically, like I’ve never seen in a building game before. This brings new possibilities:
- How do my pirates get quickly from the bottom to the top? There are elevators, but they’re expensive.
- Which resources located higher up need to be transported quickly and in large quantities elsewhere?
- Where do I plan my processing buildings? Directly under the resources or across the mountain because the straight line is so pleasantly short?
What now sounds like a blessing for every genre fan soon turns out to be a necessity for me, because one resource is under a horrible limitation: pirates.
Not everyone wants to be a pirate and that’s a problem
New residents do not just flood into Corsair Cove because it’s so nice, as it is the case in Tropico and Anno. I get pirates by “recruiting” them after raids or by fishing them like flotsam from the ocean.
New residents also occasionally come through small dilemmas, meaning decision events, into the city, often at the expense of “cohesion.” If it drops to 0, the game is over, so I always have to consider whether it’s worth it to take in new pirates.
Now every building wants a certain number of workers, and I also need some free people, the “drifters,” to carry stuff from A to B. Here, planning skills are quickly called for, and I have to prioritize whether I really need another distillery, or whether somewhere a delivery path is poorly optimized.
Getting new pirates for my Tortuga happens only sporadically, and of course I also need a crew for my pirate ships – yes, they exist too. They can, of course, get lost in battles… which further reduces my population.
Surprising features with deep attention to detail
By the way, this is the point that really made my eyes light up: Corsair Cove wants to be not just a building game but also a pirate game. Of course, I build ships and take on the Spaniards who have kidnapped my tavern keeper.
My ships sail across the sea to “events” like raids, smuggling deals, or just explorations, where I can earn rewards through small dice battles. The ships are led by captains, including Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard.
These very captains, four of whom (fully voiced) appear at first and advise me, represent different maxims of piracy, into which I can develop through quests and a “compass” that contains new building options, ships, and buffs:
- Notoriety, or “bad reputation,” focusing on all kinds of vices like gambling and brothels
- Wealth, which simply wants to amass as much gold as possible
- Empire, roughly dominion, which aims to create an independent and powerful pirate nation
- and Seafaring, which focuses on exploring the seven seas.
Small details like production chains for wooden legs or the constantly present pigs enhance the pirate feeling even further. If you didn’t know that (like I did before): pigs play a large role in the maritime context of the time as live provisions that can sustain and reproduce themselves on corresponding islands.
Stable start, but what comes next?
The demo we played doesn’t include that much: an island, a few tasks, and a limited selection of ships, buildings, and especially very few pirates (or residents). After about 3 hours, I reached the official “end.” Additional content would be available for another 4-5 hours before I would have had to start a new run.
However, in conversation, the developers told us that the release version will have several islands available, with different starting conditions and various modes: story for the campaign and the “uncharted mode” for freer exploration of the seas.
Accordingly, I haven’t burned myself out too much and am waiting for the release, because I know myself: I want to continue straight away and am disappointed when it’s suddenly over. You will soon be able to test the demo yourself, but still without a concrete date. It should not be released before May 2026. Corsair Cove itself comes to Steam, in the Epic and Microsoft Store, and from day 1 for Game Pass.
As a pirate fan, I feel a little bit like I’ve found the One Piece. Both Windrose and Corsair Cove address everything I want in this area – unfortunately both are still in development. However, since Corsair Cove has also rekindled my interest in building games, the chances are good that I’ll check out Fata Deum again: A new building game on Steam makes me a god and gives me what no game has achieved in 20 years
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