Title: Piroker
Developer: HABBY.FUN
Publisher: HABBY.FUN
Release Date: TBA
Platform: PC
Reviewed on: Steam
Price: Free

Auto battlers have been steadily gaining popularity for several years now. Riding the wave of gambling themed roguelikes that started with Luck Be a Landlord and Balatro, Piroker is an 8v8 PVP strategy game taking the round-based gameplay loop and economy of auto battlers and theming it around pirates playing poker hands. It entered an open playtest on April 10, and has received a slow trickle of updates since.

Presentation

With a UI featuring a lot of large, flashy clickables, and bouncy mixed 2D and 3D artwork inspired by Supercell, I was surprised to see that Piroker wasn’t made for mobile first and then ported to PC. The large cast of characters have really well made 2D portraits, the ambient music has a summery whimsy, and the game board gets across the pirate theme very nicely. One nice touch is an easily accessed compendium which allows you to view all of the games relics and their upgrades at a glance, which I appreciated as someone who struggles with memorizing the often insane amount of items in auto battlers. The math explosion as all of your relics trigger one by one, generating millions of score, is lifted straight from Balatro and is just as satisfying here.

I was, however, sometimes confused by game elements having difficult to parse, or in one case, broken, rules text. The games bizarre and seemingly AI-generated steam description also hyperbolizes or straight up lies about the game, and even though this is a nitpick I find the eye rolling style of AI generated writing to be a red flag in any game.

Gameplay

From the menu, you’re able to choose between a standard game (ranked or unranked) or an expedition match, which are longer games with additional modifiers. Piroker features both the asynchronous PvP that was popularized by The Bazaar and Super Auto Pets in its Expedition matches, and the standard time limited real time strategizing of Teamfight Tactics or Hearthstone Battlegrounds in its standard games.

Each run is split into rather convoluted rounds, which are then split into 5 turns. At the start of a round, cards are dealt to a central board, then turns go as follows:

• A choice phase, where you pick a relic to augment your hands, ranks, suits, or economy.
• A scoring phase, where poker hands are automatically formed from the cards on the board, and then those hands and cards are influenced by your relics before scoring, using the chips X multiplier formula used in Balatro. The top half scorers win the turn, and the bottom lose.
• And a contest phase, where the winners damage the losers.

When a round ends, there is a recovery phase where you are allowed to permanently “lock in” a relic, and all of your relics that aren’t locked in are destroyed. Rounds repeat until there is one player left standing.

Despite the poker theming, there is actually no poker going on here. You are never dealt a hand personally, so card counting and poker knowledge offer little mileage. Instead of mind games and bluffing, it may as well be a standard auto battler that is just themed after poker. But as an auto battler, it does have a solid roster of 40 heroes, 51 relics, and 50 of the fish that you’re occasionally given as bonus loot. This is enough variety for a playtest, but by my 5th match I’d already seen almost everything on offer.

Item and character choices are simple and do the job, but if you’re expecting a ton of original ideas you won’t find them here. The simplified economy and the choice to have relics display the immediate score bonus they give both heavily stunt decision making. I generally don’t mind games in this genre being simpler or more RNG dependent, but with runs being half an hour or more and without the ability to put them down and return later in the standard game mode, I found myself more often than not losing interest around the midpoint of most matches I played.

Final Score (3 out of 5 stars)

Piroker isn’t seeking to innovate, in fact it is almost entirely derivative, but it probably needs to do a little more copying from its predecessors. Auto battlers will always have at least a few hours of dumb fun, and for a free open beta it’s more than worth a couple hours of your time, especially if you’re already a fan of the genre. For the studios first ever game, I’m especially impressed by the genuinely fantastic theme and visuals. The 3 out of 5 is well earned for the games solid skeleton that could be shaped into a real competitor in the genre as it sails towards full release.

If you have an interest in pirates or auto battler games, we’d love to discuss either awesome subject on our Facebook Page or our Discord Server.

Featured Image: HABBY.FUN

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