Sandstorm: Pirate Wars Review (ASUS ZenFone Max): Ubisoft Gives Us a Barebones Almost Star Wars Scavenging Ship Experience (Video)

Star Wars The Force Awakens has some scavengers exploring ruins in the desert and that’s exactly the vibe I got from the game Sandstorm: Pirate Wars. The game comes from Ubisoft, it’s available for free in the Play Store and we played it on the ASUS ZenFone Max.

It spent 10 months in soft launch and involves side by side battles with ships and hovercrafts of all shapes and sizes. Battles are very similar to the ones we had with pirate ships in Assassin’s Creed: Pirates. There’s multiplayer in the mix and quests, more complex than one would expect, with dialogs and an atmosphere that grows on you.

You can carry people or objects, get into conflicts, but generally the situations are pretty predictable. You can find wreckage and use it for upgrades and there’s a huge variety of weapons, shields and boosts that can be applied onto the ship. There’s a pirate arena for PVP and more side missions can be found in the Tavern.

We’ve got a weapon rage during combat, when the weapons do more damage than usual and there’s also a cooldown period. Shields aren’t the only means of defense, since there are also flares to deflect rockets. 3D graphics look quite OK and we’ve got over 100 weapons to play with. You can customize the ships’ looks with all sorts of badass decals.

I found the controls meant for attack pretty relative, since swiping up didn’t immediately result into an attack. The game was pretty fun, but sometimes the battles were over in seconds and I didn’t understand why I won or lost… Anyway, I find this Ubisoft game to be superior to the last Driver game and I give it an 8.1 out of 10. You can download it here.