The life of a pirate is short and dangerous, full of adventures on the high seas, plundering galleons and sticking it to The Man. When you fire up a pirate-themed game, then, you might expect to do a lot of swashbuckling and looting (which should help take your mind off the fact that you're riddled with scurvy). Corsair Cove has other ideas.

Limbic Entertainment's pirate jaunt is a logistics-heavy city builder. The Tropico 6 developer has clearly taken inspiration from the fantastic but oft-forgotten Tropico 2: Pirate Cove, but Corsair Cove is charting its own course. Rather than making a pirate-themed reskin of, say, Tropico 6, Limbic has created a vertical city builder and pirate management game that's full of novelties.

You'll send crews off on fanciful adventures, fight ships and sealife, and search for treasure—it still ticks all the pirate boxes—but at its heart Corsair Cove is all about building an efficient pirate colony desperately gripping onto the cliffs of Skull Rock. There's not much flat land here, you see, but there are cliff faces aplenty, and it turns out that pirates are master builders.

Growth spurt

Boiled down to its absolute basics, your primary job in Corsair Cove is pretty straightforward. To grow your pirate colony, you'll need to exploit resources across the island, store them in warehouses, and then turn them into goods that your colony's cheeky (and often drunk) denizens need. In this regard, it's a classic city builder.

Since your colony is mostly going to be built on cliff faces, however, this simple task quickly becomes a lot more complex. Every building needs to have access to the web of connections that allows goods and pirates to run around the colony. On the ground, that means simple paths, but up above you'll need to construct—at first—bridges, ropes and ladders.

It's quite a bit more fiddly than designing roads in Cities: Skylines, but the tools themselves do a lot of the heavy lifting, finding the best way to make the connections that you need. This is especially true of the first tool, which dynamically switches between bridges, rope paths and ladders depending on various factors. It's surprisingly flexible, then, so when you're plotting a path you'll rarely be told that you can't go where you want.

Making sure your buildings are connected is only the first step, though. As you expand your colony with new pirate camps, the distance your workers need to travel can become an issue, creating supply bottlenecks. Long-distance trips will always be necessary, however, because certain resources can only be found in nodes on specific parts of the island. Don't worry, though, because pirates always find a way.

Corsair Cove boasts a novel tech progression system that's tied to different principles, from seafaring to empire building. Each principle also has an associated pirate captain and a variety of upgrades and new buildings. To unlock all these fancy toys, you'll need to dive into the Deeds system. These are challenges that run the gamut from having 100 pirates living in your colony to hunting down ships.

Complete a deed and you get a point to spend in the tech compass (pirates don't do trees). So if you complete three events with Captain Teach (better known as Blackbeard) you'll be able to claim an empire deed, which can be used to unlock things like destroyers and mercenary guilds. Just as exciting, this is also how you unlock elevators. Elsewhere on the compass you'll find ziplines and aerial lifts, too, each with their own unique benefits.

Beat the traffic

I can barely express the joy I feel when I watch my pirates zooming across intimidating chasms via a zipline as they go to work. Clearly this is the best way to commute. If PC Gamer built me a zipline, I probably wouldn't work from home—though it would need to transport me all the way from Scotland to the south west of England (Phil, please can we do this?).

Yesterday, I resolved an impending colony-wide mutiny (everyone was sober and hungry), simply by splashing out on a single elevator, so my pirate workers no longer needed to take the long, winding route of ladders and bridges to get from the beach to the top of an imposing cliff. It probably wouldn't pass a health and safety check, but the journey was cut down to mere seconds.

Other problems are trickier to resolve, sometimes requiring a major rethink of your colony's layout, especially once you start unlocking more efficient transportation methods—but going back to the drawing board feels like a pleasure rather than a chore. Deconstruction gives you resources back, and construction happens extremely quickly once you establish efficient connections. This allows you to just enjoy the next stage in your colony's evolution.

There are multiple ways to solve logistical conundrums though. For instance, buildings can draw resources and products from multiple sources, which you get to determine. If your galley needs more stew, you can choose to get it directly from the campfire, as well as your warehouse, since each building has its own storage area (albeit smaller than what the warehouse offers).

You'll be doing a lot of tweaking, then, but this is because you have lots of options, the result of which is a game that feels like a full-fat logistics puzzle while at the same time being extremely accessible. And when a crisis does happen, you're always given time to resolve it, with a countdown timer making sure you're able to stay on top of the bubbling disaster.

I've been impressed, too, by how Corsair Cove manages to make something that, on the surface, can seem quite dry—logistics—feel inextricably linked to the fantasy of a life of piracy. If you want to run an efficient colony, you absolutely need to send your captains on high sea adventures, get into turn-based fights and become embroiled in fanciful events. This is how you'll get extra resources, more workers and lots and lots of booty.

Pirate paradise

I also can't stress enough how much a looker Corsair Cove is. Like Tropico, it's bright and vibrant—a tropical cartoon that jibes well with the lighthearted, silly tone. The level of detail is particularly impressive, with every single building buzzing with activity and playful flourishes. I particularly love the tavern, where I can watch a man standing on a table spinning a large pig around and around. I do hope the pig is OK, though.

There are hints of Hook, Sea of Thieves and Shadow Gambit in Corsair Cove, but with the dial turned up to 11. What's most surprising is how legible it remains no matter how sprawling and complex the colony becomes, with both the art and the UI working hard to express the important things quickly and simply.

So I've become a bit smitten, even though I've only really scraped the surface. My compass is full of things still waiting to be unlocked, and most of the map remains shrouded, waiting for my bold captains to explore further afield. It makes an extremely good first impression, though, so come back later in the month for my full review. In the meantime, you should take the demo for a spin.