Review by Jon Donnis
Piroker is certainly trying something different. This colourful PC game combines poker, roguelike auto battler mechanics and pirate-themed naval combat, putting eight players into a chaotic battle for survival. On paper, it sounds like an intriguing combination.
Unfortunately, playing it is a far more confusing experience.
The biggest problem is that despite the heavy emphasis on poker, you don't actually play poker. There is no choosing cards, no applying poker knowledge and no meaningful bluffing. Instead, you collect relics, fish, pirates and other bonuses that generate coins, multipliers and other effects, with those eventually contributing to your score.
The game simply doesn't explain this system well enough. There is no proper tutorial, so you are thrown into a match against seven opponents and left to work things out. Even after several hours, I still couldn't confidently explain why I had won one game and lost another.
That makes it very difficult to find the strategy. Piroker talks about reading opponents, bluffing and finding clever combinations, but I never felt I was actually doing any of those things. I was mostly experimenting with the various options available and hoping I had somehow put together a winning combination.
There are some positives. Piroker is colourful, the pirate presentation works well and the sound effects are good. The basic idea of combining poker hands with an auto battler is also genuinely different, and there is clearly a lot of content here, with numerous pirates, skills, relics and fish offering plenty of potential combinations.
The problem is that none of this matters much if the player cannot understand the underlying mechanics.
Piroker is still in playtest, so there is time for the developers to address these issues. However, this feels like something that needs considerably more than balancing or polishing. The core gameplay needs to be reconsidered and, most importantly, properly explained.
There is potentially a fun game buried somewhere within Piroker, but right now it left me confused and disappointed rather than challenged or entertained.
For now, Piroker gets a baffling 2 out of 10.
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