Pirate Pop Plus is a 2D, arcade style game about a pirate dropping anchors to pop bubbles. But, he's dropping the anchors...upward. Or is he throwing them? Ya know what, I actually don't know what's going on in this game, but essentially, you stand underneath the bubble and click the button to make an anchor go upward and pop it, creating smaller bubbles until they can't get any smaller and a new bubble spawns. If a bubble hits you, you lose a heart (of which there are standardly three, but that can change in a way that I'll get to later). Popping the smallest bubbles can also cause coins and power-ups to drop. The power-ups have a variety of different effects that all change the way you go about popping bubbles, from freezing time to making you shoot laser beams instead of anchors to simply allowing you to use your anchors twice as quickly. Also, occasionally gravity will just go ahead and change and you'll be doing all the same stuff on the walls or ceiling instead.
Graphically, the game is designed to look like a game from the original Nintendo Gameboy by not just having a monochrome pixel art style but also by having the game be bordered by the faceplate and buttons of a system similar to a Gameboy Advance. As a nice little touch, the buttons on the digital system actually respond when you press the corresponding button on whatever controlling mechanism you're using. Unfortunately, for PC players, there's no mouse interaction, so you can't use them as actual buttons to control the game, but they're still nice to look at.
The game has two main draw-ins though: High Scores and customization. Being arcade-style, the player is competing to put their name on the leaderboard which has only five spots on it and the game comes out of the box (or out of the code I guess, seeing how it's as-of-yet only available digitally) with five brutal developer high scores to keep you coming back until only one name is on that board.
Customization, on the other hand, is far more of a completionist matter. The game lets you use coins to purchase changes to all sorts of things in the game, including the color of the faceplate and buttons, the color of the "backlight" (effectively changing the color of the game), the music (all great tunes created by different artists), and even the statistics of the character you play the game with. With so many options to customize the game, there's a look for everyone available in the game, and enough content to unlock to keep you playing for longer.
Pirate Pop Plus is simplistic in the right way, making the game easy to understand, but hard to properly execute. It won't take long for you to figure out how everything works, but it'll take you a while to put it into practice to the point where you're putting your initials onto the leader board even once. Knowing exactly when to launch your anchor to pop a particularly elusive bubble takes a while to get a good feel for, but once you understand it well enough (and well enough is probably the best you'll ever get to), the game becomes a fast-paced balancing act of risk and reward to stay alive as long as possible and get the best score possible. It may not seem like much. It may look behind the times compared to today's standard AAA game, but it's the kind of game that'll make you laugh and cry at least until you get your name in the top spot. So, I give Pirate Pop Plus "That Moment When A Bubble Hits You And Pops In The Process"(7)/10. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to grind coins to make my fake GBA look fabulous. It's called fashion, sweetheart. Look it up.
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