It's not easy to make a good comedic video game. Comedy in general is a difficult thing to get right, but in an interactive medium like video games there's so much more that can go wrong. Here Be Dragons, unfortunately, proves that this is the case, by delivering a potently unfunny experience wrapped in a surprisingly solid tactical strategy game.
Here Be Dragons bills itself as a satirical take on the age of Christopher Columbus, and proves repeatedly that it has no idea what satire means. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of history can tell you that there was a great deal about the real Christopher Columbus that could readily be satirized, but Here Be Dragons doesn't concern itself with anything real. It casts Columbus as a childish moron for a cheap laugh and never confronts any of the real man's many vices. And unfortunately, the game's portrayal of Columbus sets the bar for the humor of the rest of the game. The player is handed the reigns of several sailors over the course of the game, and each one is little more than a gag character, built around a single joke of a personality trait and never given any depth or realism. They're shallow caricatures with no staying power. The story the game tells is thus all but impossible to get invested in; you can't relate to any of the characters because they aren't characters. They're just jokes dressed as pirates.
The truly tragic thing about the game's failed attempt at humor is that the tactical gameplay is actually quite fun. It takes the form of tactical, turn-based combat. The player is in control of a small group of ships and is tasked with facing down a wide array of terrifying nautical beasts, including whales, hydras, and mermaids. Each unit has an attack value and a defense value, and on each turn they get a salvo, dealing damage equal to their attack to another unit. Damage that exceeds the target's defense value is dealt to their health, and combat continues until one side is destroyed completely.
The game shakes combat up in a truly unique way by introducing a dice mechanic. At the start of each turn, one six-sided die is rolled for each unit on the field. Each side chooses one die for each of their units, assigning these dice to special abilities that can influence fights in a variety of ways, like healing units or dealing extra damage. This is the benefit of having multiple characters; while none of them are interesting people, each does come with a fleet of ships with unique abilities that have different dice rolls that must be assigned to them. This is a good way to prevent gameplay from getting too stale, because every time the game gives you a new captain you have to re-learn how to play with whatever abilities you're presented with.
Here Be Dragons does an exceptional job of making every choice you make with your dice matter. The game is very difficult, and the stakes are high in almost every encounter. There are several factors to take into account when choosing dice, and chief among these is the initiative system. The player always starts with initiative, but this can change every time dice are picked. Whoever has the lowest value assigned to all their units combined gets initiative. The side with initiative not only gets to choose dice first, but they also launch their salvos first and activate their abilities first. Having initiative can be the difference between life and death sometimes, and some of the tensest moments in the game come when the player has to decide whether a less effective turn with lower dice rolls is better than a more effective turn that will lose them the initiative.
And that's far from the only decision players have to make in combat. Not every unit will be able to use every die roll; for instance, shockingly few player ships have any use for a roll of 3, and not many enemies can use a roll of 1. If a side finishes assigning dice without assigning one to every unit, each of their units takes one damage for each die they didn't assign. Ergo if the player has two ships and only gives one of them a die, both ships take damage. This is true for the enemies as well, which adds another layer of strategy; if the player has initiative, they can leave the enemy with dice they cannot assign and force them to take damage. This will usually bring their dice total much lower, however, which could give them initiative and give them an edge in the long run. Sometimes the player may even be inclined to refuse dice that they could use so that they can keep initiative. Playing a few turns ahead is key to survival in Here Be Dragons.
With a game this reliant on dice rolls, luck is of course a considerable factor. The game presents you with another mechanic to mitigate that slightly in the form of ink. Ink is a resource that is given to the player irregularly throughout a battle. You can spend ink to do a number of things that can influence the fight; you can use it to heal your ships, or change dice values to give you more options in combat. Ink is a handy solution but it's far from a perfect one, and it's not the most reliable either. It can make for some pretty exciting moments when it pays off, but over-reliance on it can kill.
If you ignore the game's terrible sense of humor it's a pretty engaging take on the tactical genre. It's incredibly unforgiving, and it's not uncommon for a player to have to replay a level several times before they hit on a strategy that works. The gameplay doesn't get stale, though, and there's always something new you can try to tip the odds in your favor. If the developers had used this strategy engine to tell even the most rudimentary of standard pirate stories, and cut out the humor entirely, this game would be a gem. As it is, every cutscene and line of dialogue is like the sand you have to dig through to reach the buried treasure on the beach. It's up to you to decide if this challenging strategic adventure is reward enough for your efforts.
Here Be Dragons is available for PC. A digital PC download code was provided to Screen Rant for purposes of review.