Best pirate-themed video games, ranked

What pirate game reigns over the e-seas?

Unless you count most of the movies in the Pirates Of The Caribbean series, every pirate-themed movie made after the 1960s has brought nothing but financial ruin to Hollywood. Cutthroat Island? It sunk an entire studio.  Disney’s Treasure Planet and Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas? Many credit them for having killed traditional 2D animation altogether. Hardly the crime any movie pirate would like to be remembered for.

Luckily, pirates have thrived in the world of gaming — in more ways than one — you could say. Over the course of its entire history, gaming has featured a wide variety of pirate-themed games. There’s no lack of offers, variety, and quality, so let’s find out which one is the best of them all.

10. GreedFall (2019)

GreedFall is the pirate game for Witcher fans. It’s an action RPG developed by Spiders — the studio, not the creatures. It takes place in a world of piracy that’s also home to a hell of a lot of elements that we just have to assume weren’t present in historically-accurate pirate times.

While players shouldn’t expect great sea battles, GreedFall features great fantasy worldbuilding that includes monsters, a mysterious plague ravaging the populace, and decision-making that will impact our journey.

Players can approach the game in a variety of ways. There’s diplomacy, stealth, and even the “pirate manner.” The gameplay is far from perfect, and definitely not as overtly pirate-y as the other entries on the list, but GreedFall’s world features a beautiful “pirate” aesthetic and provides a strange allure that one just can’t deny.

9. Blackwake (2017)

In theory, Blackwake is a very simple game. You command a pirate ship and try to board other ships while avoiding boarding attempts from rival crews.

Whether they’re using a canon, rifle, or pistol, players get exactly one shot before they have to deal with a ridiculously long-though-realistic reloading time. This sounds awful in text, but it works marvelously in-game because that’s also the reality of the enemy. Missing a shot will, at best, result in having to sit through the most stressfully long reload animation as you hope you don’t get killed before you get to shoot again.

Blackwake made sea battles fun even without making pirate weapons fun. That’s how good it is. On top of that, the game also features neat mechanics, like having to actively fix your ship, draining out the water that’s leaking in due to enemy canon fire, and healing via drinking rum. Great stuff.

8. Sea Of Thieves (2018)

If we have Blackwake in this list, then we must also include Sea Of Thieves, because it expands and improves upon everything that the former tried. Want to take to the sea alone? You’ll have fun. Want to journey with your friends in the search for lost treasure? You’ll have even more fun. Want to go with your friends in the search for found treasure inside some other team’s ship? You’ll have the most fun.

Sea Of Thieves is the first and still best (Skull & Bones, where the hell are you?!) seafaring MMO. It’s also the first great game made by Rare after Microsoft’s acquisition.

7. Tempest (2016)

Tempest is an action RPG that emphasizes the naval warfare side of things. It features a wide array of customization options and allows players to experience a complex world of seafaring, exploration, crew management, and naval combat.

It’s no slouch on land, either. Players can also engage in swashbuckling adventures against land-based enemies who are also in search of wealth — or simply trying to defend their poor little forts.

This is the closest we have to a serious “pirate simulator” — if there can even be such a thing in a medium so heavily distorted by tales of drunken sailors.

6. Monkey Island 2: Lechuck’s Revenge (1991)

Not all pirates need to be physically strong. Not all pirate games require heavy action.

Sometimes all you need is to insult your enemy until his mind is frail enough for him to lose against your piss-poor sword skills. That is one of the dubiously hilarious lessons you’ll learn from the Monkey Island series, a pirate tale that somehow foregoes any sort of action mechanics in favor of clever writing and puzzles.

I picked Monkey Island 2 specifically for this list because I think it’s the best of the bunch. Still, pretty much any game in the series will do it for those looking for a fun pirate romp.

Bonus Points: If you feel enticed by the comedy of Monkey Island but are more into the action of Sea Of Thieves than you’re into puzzles, then you’d perhaps be happy to learn that they’ve transplanted Monkey Island into Sea Of Thieves in an epic crossover event.

Screenshot by MobyGames

5. Skies of Arcadia (2000)

Disclaimer: sky pirates are pirates.

At the time of its release, Skies Of Arcadia went mostly unnoticed, possibly due to a sore lack of the words “Final” and “Fantasy” in its title. That was a mistake.

Time has vindicated this marvelous and highly inventive RPG as its fanbase has grown immensely ever since its release. Sadly, the only two ways to legally play it nowadays are via your cursed console of choice, the Dreamcast or the GameCube.

We’d really like to see a re-release of this one, even if they keep the entire thing as is. Otherwise, most people interested in playing it will have to resort to, welp, measures that would make the characters of this game proud.

In the meantime, we’re looking forward to Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire, an upcoming RPG that could be seen as the spiritual successor to Skies of Arcadia.

4. The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker (2002)

Back in ’02, few would have expected Link to become a pirate, but they’d be wrong. Wind Waker shows Link at his most daring, and not just in the visual sense.

At first, Wind Waker looks just like a regular Zelda game, but it doesn’t take long for it to show its true colors and send players on a boat trip across the seas of its world in a way that no other game had done before.

Wind Waker’s sea itself can feel a little lackluster. That’s perhaps because it misses random events such as the ones introduced by Red Dead Redemption that do such a great job of making a deserted area feel lively. Still, Wind Waker does a great job of providing yet another stellar addition to the Zelda catalog and enticing other developers to try their hand at this genre.

3. Elite Dangerous (2014)

Disclaimer: the same applies to space pirates

Even though it looks like a regular space shooter, this one is actually about straight-up space piracy. It just has to be in here. Elite Dangerous features space battles as fun as those of any other space game and even has a lot more depth than what many would expect from a game that’s seemingly just about laser-blasting things in space.

And what’s a pirate game without spectacular tales of piracy? Even though Eve Online gets all the credit for having the best player-made stories, many fans have also used Elite Dangerous as a beautiful stage for some of online gaming’s most epic tales of treachery.

2. Sid Meier’s Pirates! (2004)

The title says it all. This is the guy who did Civilization doing a simulation of pirate life. I mean, kind of an embellished and simplified simulation, but it’s all the better for it.

Pirates is, in essence, a simple navigation game intertwined with various minigames. Still, it works beautifully because mostly every single one of the minigames provides enormous fun and enriches this world. Ok, maybe not the dancing one. That one kind of sucks.

This isn’t the first Pirates game by Sid Meier. It’s actually a remake of the one he did in ’87. Feel free to play that one instead if you feel like a purist — and find a way to run it — but this is one of the few remakes that clearly surpasses the original. Regardless of which game you pick, Sid Meier’s work in the pirate genre likely remains the most fun and influential in gaming history.

1. Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag (2013)

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is arguably the best game in the series. Ironically, it’s also the one people say should have more pirate action and less assassin stuff. Let’s not get the fans wrong. It’s still great when it comes to classic Assassin’s Creed-type action. It’s just that its pirate adventures proved so interesting and refreshing that people couldn’t stay away from them. Few things beat boarding a ship in a game that features the production values of the Assassin’s Creed series. The sea shanties also rock.

The success of Black Flag prompted Ubisoft to do yet another pirate-themed AC game, the severely underrated Assassin’s Creed: Rogue. More importantly, even, it paved the way for Ubisoft to begin working on Skull & Bones, the company’s first full-on pirate game. Its development has been long and rough, but we hope it will come out one day to take Black Flag’s spot at the top of this list.

Tiago Manuel

Tiago is a freelancer who used to write about video games, cults, and video game cults. He now writes for Destructoid in an attempt to find himself on the winning side when the robot uprising comes.

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