Last night I had the opportunity to BETA test the Buccaneer game. While surfing the GG site one day I saw the announcement for the upcoming game Called Buccaneer. For some reason the graphics and game play style interested me, so I checked out their site and noticed they had an upcoming first BETA and got involved with the first BETA test.

The BETA test was scheduled for different areas, the UK being first followed by the US. I offered to serve as host for the US games so I got setup and joined in the testing early. I found out everyone was eager to get into the game and start testing (err playing). I think there may have been around 40 testers with 20 involved on a steady basis. Once I joined in the game you could tell that Simon and Harvey the developers were getting tired as it was 3:00Am their time and they stayed up to welcome the US testers!

Game Play

Getting a first look at this game was awesome. From the first loading screen the graphics looked top notch and very well rival any commercial game out there. The ocean and wave affects were impressive. Ship animation and movement was very nice and smooth. The maps were average side and were of course open water maps with each team having their own ports. Each team had to retrieve treasure and bring back to their port while dogging the constant bombardment from the opposing team and port cannons. I think I was able to test the low score feature of the game very well:)

The ships are controlled moving in the normal manner using the WASD keys and mouse for panning and shooting, left for port cannons and right for starboard. Or was that left for starboard and right for port? Oh well, when you buy the game you can figure it out.

I think the developers got great feedback on some different aspect on the gameplay from the testers. I won't list them here as I don't want to give away a lot of details of the game, that is for the developers. I can say gameplay is fast and furious and I think Harv and Simon may change that "W" key to save some of our fingers. I think there were a few keyboards demolished last night trying to turn sharper and gain speed:)

Multi-Player

The main objective for this testing was to provide feedback to the developers on the playability over the network. In this area I think they were pleasantly surprise at the outcome. Even with this BETA, with no optimizing we were able to simulate a dedicated server situation and provided multiplayer with players from the UK, US and lets not forget Argentina! A very nice mix of network connections and speeds, and the game was very playable for me as host. I noticed very little LAG except when all the ships were on screen at once, and most of the players reported acceptable LAG on their end. I think there was one time we had bad lag, and I will contribute that to someone getting on my network and taking up some bandwidth:)

Overall Opinion

Very glad that Simon and Harv allowed me to participate in this BETA. I think the testing went straight from testing to playing as the testers were amazed at the game play. It's hard to control that many testers when the game is so much fun to play. But all testers maintained their professionalism and Simon and Harv had a ton of feedback to go through over the next few weeks. Be careful what you ask for:)

Everyone should keep an eye out for this game when it finally comes out. It will be well worth the wait. In fact, I can't wait for the next BETA testing session.

Sorry for the short review, I am not much on words, and my fingers are tired from all of the playing last night. So I will let a few in game screen shots do the rest of the talking.

These are posted with the permission of Stickman Studios. But please note these are BETA screenshots and do not represent what the final game quality will look like. Also, the screenshots will keep me from getting flamed:)

(First time posting pics, so lets see how it goes)