Corsair’s Madness review for PC

There’s no shortage of NES-influenced games at the moment, so from that perspective it’s easy to take one look at Corsair’s Madness and lump it in with the rest of the pile.

Not because it’s not a platformer that draws heavily from the glory days of 8-bit gaming. No, it absolutely is that. Everything in the game feels like it comes straight from the ‘80s, from the graphics, to the chiptunes soundtrack, to the level design. It’s all so unabashedly retro that if you played Corsair’s Madness without knowing it’s from 2024, you could probably be convinced it’s some lost and long-forgotten game from 35 years ago.

But you’d probably be convinced you were playing a very good lost and long-forgotten game from 35 years ago. Corsair’s Madness is a good reminder that there’s nothing inherently wrong with being yet another 2D platformer if the levels are well-designed and mix in new things every now and again.

To that end, Corsair’s Madness’ twist is that you don’t just play as a pirate, you also play as a possessed being with neat powers. That means the game has two halves neatly slotted alongside each other. Much of the time, you’re playing as a human pirate, using your sword (and a few fun inventions) to battle snakes and birds and man-eating plants, but there are also times where your powers get a little more mystical, and you find yourself fighting zombies and sand demons and other monsters. The two halves are different enough that they never feel like the same thing reskinned with different characters, but at the same time they’re similar enough that the skills you learn for one half work well on the other side too.

On top of that, Corsair’s Madness adds in little touches here and there to make the game more dynamic than just another 2D platformer. There are village scenes where you talk to people and gain new upgrades, and there are side-scrolling shooter sequences where your corsair takes on surfing skeletons and other bad guys.

Take all these things together, and you have the ingredients for a game that doesn’t add much new to its inspirations, but that’s nonetheless good at capturing the spirit of what made those games fun. Corsair’s Madness won’t make you forget about classics from the NES era, but it’s fun enough that you could easily imagine playing right alongside them.

Madnetic Games provided us with a Corsair’s Madness PC code for review purposes.