Top 15+ Ship and Pirate Games You Must Play Right Now – High-quality games about seafaring and ship battles with engaging gameplay are hard to find today. It’s surprising that there are so few games that offer these experiences. However, some worthy titles do exist. In this article, I will talk about the best ship and pirate games you must play right now. So, let’s get started.
1. The Pirate: Caribbean Hunt
This free RPG about pirates features a vast open world set in the Caribbean and offers a wide variety of ships—over 100 unique types. The game allows players to become the captain of an entire fleet, complete exciting missions, and engage in interesting skill upgrades.
Players can interact with five different nations—declaring war and destroying their ships, or forming alliances. The gameplay is quite diverse: you can switch and upgrade ships, enhance your captain’s skills, build secret pirate fortresses, capture settlements, and manage them.
2. Age of Water
This new adventure MMO game is set on a flooded Earth. Players choose a ship and materials for its hull, affecting speed and durability. Ship construction involves various modules like helms, pumps, and weapons. The selection of modules is extensive: machine guns, flamethrowers, torpedoes, wind generators, and desalination units.
You can install radar and sonar for deep-sea exploration or fishing gear for gathering provisions. Enemies are diverse: aerial pirates, heavily armed scavengers, and mutants. Each crew member has unique skills that can be upgraded for tasks such as combat, repair, or resource processing.
Exploring the open oceanic world, players can engage in trade, piracy, bounty hunting, parcel delivery, and smuggling. It is crucial to manage food and water supplies, monitor the ship and crew’s condition, develop a base, and build new ships.
3. Sea of Thieves
This action-adventure pirate sandbox game is perfect for adventure enthusiasts. On a customizable ship, players sail the seas and explore a vast open world filled with islands, treasures, and hostile mobs.
Players can also battle other players, proving which crew is stronger and whose ship is better prepared to conquer the seas. After a short tutorial, you can do anything you want in the game. For instance, assemble a crew, raise the pirate flag, and raid other players’ chests.
Alternatively, you can search for treasures, capture outposts, or play solo, though it’s challenging. The game’s world is massive and full of activities like encountering the Megalodon, Kraken, and ghost ships.
4. Salt 2: Shores of Gold
This game focuses on exploration, crafting, and survival in an endless procedurally generated world. You can sail in any direction and explore various islands filled with caves, ruins, pirate camps, and other mysterious places. Players can craft armor and weapons, hunt, and fish.
There are quests that increase your character’s level. Your ship serves as your base, where you can place forges, workbenches, kitchens, and sleeping quarters. Visiting ports is necessary to sell found treasures and buy supplies, ingredients for cooking, and crafting materials.
5. Sail Forth
In this game, you travel through diverse locations, develop your fleet, and fight pirates, sea monsters, and the sea itself. The game world consists of various environments, each with its own flora and fauna.
You can customize your ship by choosing flags and sails and finding new weapons and equipment. You don’t have to abandon your favorite boat when you get a new one; just add it to your fleet and continue your adventure.
6. DREDGE
In this game, you embark on a journey through mystical places, fishing and uncovering sinister secrets hidden underwater. You sell your catch to locals and complete tasks to uncover the story of these mysterious locations.
You can customize your ship with advanced equipment to reach distant lands and catch rarer fish. Occasionally, you may encounter unwelcome guests who want to steal your catch or sink your ship.
7. Horizon’s Gate
An impressive combination of a role-playing game, turn-based tactics, and a simulator of a sea fleet captain with a visual style reminiscent of JRPGs from the 90s. With such an interesting world and number of possibilities, few big-budget games can boast.
Gameplay-wise, the game resembles Final Fantasy Tactics with its classes, ground battles, and equipment. It takes the economy with various trading goods and pirates from Mount and Blade and Space Rangers.
The atmosphere of naval battles, cannons, and other ship equipment is borrowed from Sid Meier’s Pirates. And in land missions and dungeons, the game resembles Chrono Trigger. The game also features a simple but interesting crafting system.
8. Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail
This tactical wargame immerses players in epic naval campaigns of the American Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The gameplay includes both naval and land battles, with a primary focus on ship-to-ship combat.
The game features a detailed damage model, historically accurate sailing ships, and weaponry that history buffs will recognize. Each ship has a unique behavior model, adding to the realism and strategic depth.
9. Atlantic Fleet
This real-time strategy simulator features naval warfare from an isometric perspective. Players can engage in single battles, scenarios, or a campaign for one of two British naval fleets. Both factions offer a wide selection of warships, from the most famous to the more obscure.
Aircraft can be used to strike enemy ships, providing a strategic advantage. The campaign consists of 50 missions, rewarding players with currency to purchase ships. However, the fleet is limited to ten ships, and only three can be taken into battle at a time.
10. Tempest: Pirate Action RPG
This arcade adventure action game about pirates allows players to upgrade their ship, explore the seas, and complete quests for legendary items that summon sea monsters.
The gameplay is reminiscent of Sid Meier’s Pirates! Players sail a map filled with factions, quests, and enemies. When combat is required, a location loads where battles are fought by pirate-era rules. Your crew, which can be customized and leveled up, assists in combat.
Between battles, players can dock at ports for repairs, restock ammunition, and recruit crew members, as well as recharge artifacts. Artifacts, a unique feature of the game, come in various types, and the ship can be upgraded, changed, and customized.
11. Blackwake
This free-to-play team-based action game focuses on dynamic naval battles. Every crew member is an integral combat unit with specific roles: steering the ship, igniting cannon fuses, or preparing for boarding enemy vessels.
Similar to Sea of Thieves but with inferior graphics, the game features character customization and convincing combat mechanics. Players will find a variety of classic weapons, such as flintlock rifles and iron cannons on large galleons. The game boasts excellent physics, destructible ships, 40-player naval and land battles, and impressive weather effects.
12. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
Arguably one of the best installments in the series, Black Flag offers a captivating adventure since Assassin’s Creed II. The game excels in open-world exploration of the Caribbean archipelago, featuring tiny islands, whales, coastal fortresses, and massive armadas.
On large islands, players can engage in traditional series activities. While primarily an action game with ships, upgrades, and economic elements, it’s not a pure sailing simulator. Nevertheless, it remains one of the best pirate games, offering a vast open world and thrilling naval battles.
13. Assassin’s Creed Rogue
Another notable entry is Assassin’s Creed Rogue, the eighth installment in the series and a sequel to Black Flag. Set in mid-18th century America, the protagonist is a Templar and former Assassin hunter.
The storyline intersects with Black Flag, featuring many familiar characters. The game excels in naval elements, including ship battles and boarding actions, with the hero commanding a ship capable of river navigation.
New ship weapons and firearms have been introduced, and enemies can now board your ship. Diving has been removed due to the cold water, which depletes health. Overall, it’s an intriguing spin-off that highlights the darker aspects of the Assassins.
14. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the latest in the series with robust naval combat, feels like a different game compared to earlier titles. The game has shifted towards an RPG genre with character selection, leveling, skills, weapon and armor rarity, dialogue choices, and some non-linearity.
Besides land adventures, players can embark on sea voyages, assemble their own crew, and capture islands. However, naval mechanics haven’t changed much from Black Flag, except for arrows and spears replacing cannons and more customization options.
Upgrading your ship requires substantial resources, but if you enjoy the ancient Greek setting and exploring a vast world, Odyssey is an excellent choice.
15. Naval Action
This complex multiplayer action game features sailing ships with realistic graphics, an expansive open world, and historically accurate 18th-century naval battles. The game includes various types of naval artillery, from long guns to carronades and mortars. Players can refit ships based on their capabilities.
Coastal forts and batteries provide support during coastal and harbor battles. Factors like hull angles, ship positioning to the wind, cargo weight, upgrades, and ship condition affect speed and maneuverability.
16. Blazing Sails
Imagine Sea of Thieves as a battle royale game—Blazing Sails offers a pirate-themed battle royale experience where players hunt for hidden treasures on islands and plunder and sink competitor ships.
Battles occur on both land and sea, and players can customize their ships and characters with cosmetic items. Naval encounters here rival many games of the same genre.
The mechanics of ship interaction are engaging: raising anchor, loading cannons, lowering sails, patching holes, pumping out water, scavenging for resources and weapons on islands, sharing with allies, all contributing to a fun experience.
17. Cold Waters
Cold Waters is one of the best submarine simulators focused on modern naval warfare. The game features a dynamically changing and unpredictable environment, including water conditions, weather, and enemy encounters.
This randomness applies to both campaign missions and standalone missions, which are continually expanded by modders. The AI is based on a unique algorithm that deeply analyzes naval battle tactics involving various classes of ships. The models of ships, their weapons, equipment, and behaviors on and below the water are highly realistic.
18. Man O’War: Corsair
This is an action RPG about naval battles set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, distinguishing it from most games discussed here. In this world ruled by monsters and magic, you’ll encounter truly monstrous ships. While the game has some issues with physics and gameplay, it also offers many unique elements.
Players take control of a ship and engage in battles, looting, and capturing crews. When the hold is full, the loot can be sold at one of 50 ports, and the ship can be upgraded. You can recruit various races, wizards, and even flying units into your crew. The enemies are unusual, including orcs, Chaos followers, sea monsters, and dark elves.
That is it from today’s post on Top 15+ Ship and Pirate Games You Must Play Right Now. If you do not agree with the points in the post and have some of your own opinions, share them with us in the comments section down below. Keep visiting Animesoulking for more information about Anime and Manga.
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