Capcom Digital Day 08: Hands-on with Plunder (XBLA, PSN, PC)

In Plunder, you control a pirate ship and it's your job to take over towns, get booty and destroy any opposition. The game is very simple and casual when it comes to the fighting aspect. Ships will shoot at each even while moving automatically so the main concern here is whether you should stay and engage or retreat back to safety. If you retreat or if you're low on health, you just go back to your pirate base and heal yourself. Or you can just fight until you die and just wait to respawn back at your pirate base. There is no penalty for dying, just the inconvenience of having to wait and respawn all the way back at your base. 

The pirate base is also where you will upgrade your ships. Before a match starts, you can upgrade your ship's speed, armor and weapons skills among other things. You can also upgrade your ship after taking over a port town when you receive their resources such wood and rum.

The key to winning will come with upgrading your ship. The sooner you can do that, the better chance you will have at taking over towns and decimating your enemies. When you're playing with other people on your team however, you'll have to really strategize who gets what as everyone upgrades from the same resource pool. So if you take all the speed resource for yourself, you'll be super fast but your friends will be moving in slowly. What's the point of being the fastest when you're being out gunned? 

You can also gain weapons called Curses after taking out A.I. controlled Merchant ships. Some of the curses include turning you ship invisible, being able to create a whirlpool wherever you want, stealing your enemies resources and so on. The Curses remind me a lot of Mario Kart's weapons system.  

I think the biggest selling point to Plunder will easily be the multiplayer and custom map creation here. With the multiplayer, up to eight people can play with each other. Four people can play on one 360 and the game is up to eight players either over LIVE or through a LAN.

Plunder will come with 25 challenge maps or you could always just design the map yourself too. Plunder allows you to create a map, either super tiny or extremely large and add different types of islands, towns, and pirate bases. All of this is extremely easy to use and once you're done, you can share the map you've created with your friends. Once your friend has loaded the map, it will automatically save on your friends system. When your friend shares your map with another friend, the map will auto save on their system too. The cycle will continue to repeat like that every time a map is shared. Kind of like AIDS, except without all the sex and bad stuff about it.

The best user created maps will go into the future downloadable content update that will be released for the game periodically. The DLC will be an auto about type of deal so no money is involved here. 

Plunder will be out Summer time of this year and should retail for about $10/800 Microsoft Points for the PlayStation Network, Xbox LIVE Arcade, and PC.