Pirada I, The Fearless

A pirate shooter from the early nineties that hardly anyone remembers today. Pirada I: The Fearless boasted an ambitious name and even more ambitious visual flourishes — for 1992, it was reasonably decent graphics with plenty of colors and animations. But ambition ended where the fun should have begun.

It's a straightforward action game from a top-down perspective. You control a fearless (or rather reckless) pirate who fights his way through a scene full of enemies and obstacles. You collect ammo, dodge bullets, and if you're lucky, you make it to the next level. Seemingly simple, but actually frustrating — enemies appear without logic, bullets fly from all directions, and your reflexes aren't fast enough to react. Especially now, when I'm used to the graphics and smoothness of modern games, you'll run into overly sensitive controls and chaos that doesn't look like design, but rather like a bug.

The graphics try, that's clear. The colorfulness and character animations have a certain charm, and the sounds — when they play at all — add atmosphere. The problem is that the effort on appearance overshadows the actual content. The game feels like a tech demo that forgot to be fun. There aren't many levels, and on each one you experience the same cycle: run in, shoot, die, try again. No story, no motivation, no reason to come back.

For retro enthusiasts it has a certain historical appeal — it's proof of how people in the early nineties thought about action games and what they considered "modern". But playability? That's a different story. Pirada I is more of a curiosity than a classic. Today you'll play it more to jog your memory than because you'll actually have fun with it. Those who want to explore every corner of oblivion will find it, but everyone else can safely complain that there are better ways to spend their time.