I’ve always enjoyed pirate games, something about being able to live that truly free lifestyle is appealing and dangerous. Living on the edges of the various ruling empires, making your living however you see fit is quite the fantasy nowadays. Pirate games usually go two different ways, either more of the Sim side like Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Port Royal 4 , or they go based off more legends and fairy tales like an Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Sea of Thieves, and The Secret of Monkey Island. The Pirate: Republic of Nassau strays more on the Sim side, more akin to Sid Meire’s Pirates!. However, since it is a VR game, there is a decent amount of VR gameplay interactivity which helps separate this pirate Sim from the others.

The Pirate: Republic of Nassau isn’t a very complicated game, much like a pirates life, you aren’t going to be bogged down with a lot of narrative story driven structure. There are general goals the game will provide for you during your main quest of building the Republic of Nassau, however, this is sort of how the game treats its tutorial. Initial goals start off small like recruiting another pirate captain and building a warehouse to store your material. Then you will need to build a tavern to start earning passive income. It is small guidelines like these that are the quest structure, but the ultimate goal is to build the Republic of Nassau and make the most fearsome fleet of pirate captains.

The Captain’s Quarters are where you will manage most of everything. Welcome to the Republic.

Like I mentioned before, The Pirate: Republic of Nassau is a Sim, but it does mix in some gameplay as well. This means that you will be managing plenty of menus. Organizing your fleet, your inventory, and going to ports is done all through menus. Ports will have various options depending on if it is a main city or just a smaller settlement. Main cities will offer various services like a Tavern where you can pay for information on any Rumors, Ports, or Ships. Rumors will provide locations of sunken ships or a merchant ship that lost cargo. Ports will mark one of the nearest Ports on your map to visit. Ships will mark any traveling Merchants you can shoot down and loot or any other captains to trade with. The Tavern also lets you hire and release crew members if needed.

Other City services include a shop which is pretty self explanatory, a Shipyard where you can upgrade and repair your ships, and a Marchant’s Guild which is very handy when you get into trading. The Merchant’s Guild is where you can buy information on the regions market prices and what certain settlements are in need of. This is extremely important for squeezing the most out of your hard earned material. Or, you can easily go buy up the material in the towns that have a surplus and then sell it in the ones that are in dire need and will pay a pretty penny for it.

Look for the cities that have red goods, here are where you want to sell those items.

The Ports also provide other missions like governors asking for your aid in taking over another settlement, which is fun, but not as rewarding as I hoped. There is a decent battle taking on ships and even a land base, and the payout is only five hundred gold. I felt like the ammo used and the damage I took basically spent the five hundred in restocking and repairing my ship. There will also be people who offer to pay you for safe passage to another port, these are lower paying as well, but fine when first starting out.

I’ve been talking about a lot of the contextual side of the game, which is a big part for sure, but let me get into the actual VR aspects. For the most party you will be accessing all of these menus from your Captains Log in your Captain Quarters, which is very nicely detailed. You have a large map on your table, your log book that acts as your quick select for what you need, and board in front of you to pick all the options at the Ports or Shipyard etc. Long distance travel is done with a zoomed out map where you control a small version of your ship. As you travel it counts the hours and cost of being at sea. Once you get to a location you can choose to either dock or engage whatever the mission is like a sunken ship or merchant.

I do wish the travel used the same detailed map that is in the Captain’s Quarters. This map is a bit low quality.

Once you get to your activity, that is when you will be able to control your ship. There are a couple different ways to control the ship and that is up to your comfort. I preferred the full motion controls over using the inputs, but there are times where using standard input control is useful. Raising your hand will raise the sails which obviously gets your moving, and you will need to grab the helm to steer the ship yourself. Or you can simply hold down on the Left Grip button and use the Left Stick to steer the ship. Pressing up on the Left Stick up raise the sails or lower the sails as well. I personally enjoyed using the motions controls for the steering, but during combat it can get a little wonky due to the controls.

Clicking down on the Right Stick will activate battle mode, and you will use the Right Stick to aim up and down for the volley of the cannon balls. Pressing the Y button will change which cannons you use, depending on the ship you may have forward cannons along with side cannons. Pressing down on the Left Stick will Change the cannon ball type, and Right Trigger is shoot. What made it a bit wonky is when I’d want to switch cannonball types (Grapeshot, Chain Shot, Regular), I’d move the left stick a bit while clicking. This would pull me off the helm, make me lose grasp of the handles, and I’d have to reposition in the middle of a fight.

Sinking ships allows you to take the crew and all the goods. If the ship captain gives up you can recruit the ship as well.

Ship battles are a key part in The Pirate: Republic of Nassau, not only are they how you can score massive loot, take ships and crews, but also how you can recruit other pirates to The Republic. Using all the different items is the key to success even if at first they don’t seem necessary in the beginning. Quickly you’ll learn to use the Chain Shots to take out the sails to slow the ships down, and then Grape Shot to kill the crew so they they can’t reload as fast. You can also give your crew Rum to help speed up your ship and raise your Pirate Flag to make reloading faster. There are explosive traps to throw in the water if a boat is chasing you.

The only thing that is truly missing in the boat combat is being able to board the enemy ships. I feel like it could be an option at some point if it continue to grow because the gameplay is there. They have the ability to jump off your ship, swim to another ship and climb up on it. I’ve only tested it on my own fleet ships, but the ability is there as well as hand to hand combat from other ability. Speaking of, let’s get into the other gameplay.

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Outside controlling your ship to pick up floating materials and ship battles, you will be able to get off your ship for various activities. There are sunken ships where you will be ablet to loot chests of gold, cut the ropes of sunken crates to bring back to the ship, find pearls in clams, and possibly find a map of where the crew hid their gold. Finding the maps are a worth a ton because they pull in thousands of gold. These missions find you plundering caves where you will need to navigate through winding corridors with a torch in hand to try and find the hidden gold. Prison Breaks and Camp Assaults will have you wielding swords, knives, bombs, and using stealth to attack.

All of these excursions are a good change of pace from the other half of The Pirate: Republic of Nassau‘s menu system. However, besides the underwater sunken ship exploration, the rest sort of need more work. The cave looting is nice, but after the first couple it all feels the same. There aren’t any enemies or traps, and besides the random spider that might jump on your face, there isn’t anything to worry about here. The Prison Breaks and Camp Assaults offer a lot of combat, unfortunately, hit detection issues with the sword combat cheapen it. Ultimately, I feel like there just needs to be more variety within even these select few activities.

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All that being said, I am still having fun with everything in this game as it comes to me. If I was to only do one of these things over and over it probably would get stale. Yet, the sum of all its parts is what is impressive. I found it was very easy to sink hours into it at a time, to the point where the reason I’d have to stop is to recharge my headset. I can easily pick apart the individual shortcomings, but there is something fun here. Performance is solid on the Meta Quest 3, I had no motion sickness and the framerate remained solid. While not the most demanding title, it performed well and that helped keep me locked into my pirate adventure.

Visually, The Pirate: Republic of Nassau is a bit of a mixed bag. Like I mentioned before, the Captain’s Quarters are very well detailed and that looks really good. As does the general ship designs and crew that is on your ship, and the underwater diving for the sunken ships. However, once you start looking a bit further or at some smaller details, that is when things get a bit choppy. Trees on islands as well as some smaller details on ships are just those 2D cardboard cut outs that follow the camera to face you. Character models on rowboats that you can rescue after you sunk a ship are extremely low detailed. The water and waves look okay, nothing amazing, but not terrible.

Sounds design is good with plenty of quality general sound effects of sailing ships. The creaking boards, the crew working on things, the wind blowing and water sloshing around. Battles are crunchy with cannonballs crashing through the wood or the sound of sheets tearing when a Chain Shot hits your sails. There is also the addition of sea shanties that will start sometimes or you can activate them by ringing the bell on the bow of the ship. These are well made and a nice rousing addition. My only problem is I don’t find myself sailing long enough to enjoy many of them since you aren’t sailing port to port in that gameplay. Voice acting itself is also delivered well, but repeated voice lines do become grating.

The Pirate: Republic of Nassau is a game that I would recommend to anyone that is looking for a that itch they had with Sid Meier’s Pirates!, but always wanted a bit more, and also wants it in VR. While its individual aspects still need some work coming out of early access, I found myself sinking hours into this very easily and enjoying it a ton. I can see this being an absolute classic and a must have for any VR pirate fan, especially if the developers keep listening to the feedback and updating the game. FOR THE REPUBLIC!

The Pirate: Republic of Nassau is available now on Meta Quest 2, and Meta Quest 3/3S.

Reviewed on Meta Quest 3.