Pirates of the Caribbean

Ah, here are those pirates that I keep hearing so much about.

Whilst installing this game I silently promised myself that if it was full of one-eyed, bearded freaks with wooden legs and mangy parrots with all the cuddliness of a pipe-cleaner on their shoulders then I would award it with a zero out of ten on principle. Thankfully though there aren't any Long John Silver wannabes to be seen anywhere.

Those bloomin' French. All of a sudden they show up out of nowhere and capture a thriving English colony on one of the smaller islands in the Caribbean. Still, it gives you an excuse for grassing them up and getting sent to do all sorts of quests in exchange for gold. Along the way you may even bump into some pirate ships and blow them up for a laugh.
Ha-ha! A life on the ocean waves indeed.

All at sea

Here we are, stabbing some French guards

This game has been described as 'Morrowind at sea' in some corners of the globe, though I feel that such a label is rather misplaced. Whilst Pirates of the Caribbean may share a few similarities, and is powered by the same engine, it is nowhere near as large, open or 'free form' as the goings on in Morrowind. Sure, you can do what you like and build up a reputation for yourself (the honest captain, or the scavenging pirate who boards merchant ships and doesn't pay off debts to the local loan sharks) but it is all done on a much smaller scale, with far less to do.

There are two parts to this game. You have the obvious bits with you wandering around on land, engaging in pointless gossip with the women on the way to the supermarket and stabbing nasty people in the face with your sword. The other part is the sailing, which is how you get from one island to another. You will often get attacked by other ships whilst travelling by sea, and the resulting battles can be quite strategic at times, with an 'FPS' mode available so that you can aim and fire the cannons yourself. There are no brakes on a ship, so it can require clever use of your sails to control your speed and keep the enemy ships in range of your cannons. Of course if the enemy ships are bigger than yours this can make things tricky - in cases like this it is best to try and board them, kill all the resisting crew members and take the vessel for yourself. Doing this saves you paying for a new ship out of your own pocket and you get to keep all the cargo and flog it at the various towns. If you have a spare officer with you, you can put them in charge of your old ship and have them follow you around, which is a good idea as you will often get attacked by more than one ship at a time.

As you progress through the game and complete quests you get awarded experience points. When you go up a level you get some skill points to distribute among the various skills you have - like swordplay, pistol accuracy, cannon accuracy and sailing ability. Whilst this allows you to customise your character for some reason you can't choose to give him a name of your choosing (though it isn't really a big deal).

Mixed bag of marbles

Looks nice, eh? Trust the French to invade and ruin it all.

One thing that strikes you about this game is the mixed quality of the graphics. Some of it looks very nice, with your character being fairly detailed with some clean textures. The other inhabitants aren't quite as well dressed up, but they certainly look the part. Much of the scenery can be fairly basic, and most of the areas on the different islands are exactly the same. Wander through the jungle area on one island and it is an exact replica of the jungle areas everywhere else and this extends to all the various paths that lead to different parts of the island. Even when you are in the towns this happens - the first time I walked into a shipyard on another island I thought that I had encountered a bug that had teleported me back to the start of the game, as it was exactly the same! It makes the game feel very cheap and it can be very disorientating as well.

Luckily the sound fares much better - most of the music is very well composed and the scores that play when you are at sea can be very relaxing. The music is in .wma format, so you can listen to it when in Windows. The sound effects are also pretty good, with swords rattling against each other convincingly and cannon fire going off with a nice enough 'boom!'

The lights are on, but nobody is home

The guvnor of one of the islands

It's quite unfortunate that this game is a case of ‘almost there, but not quite’, as there is quite a few annoyances that hurt the game as a whole. When you first start, you get a nice (if brief) introduction of how you do things on land. However, there is nothing that introduces you to the sailing - and given that your first experience of it puts you under attack from three French ships that can sink you within ten seconds this is appalling design. The same can be said about the various menus and status screens - it's very badly done and not at all friendly.

One thing in particular had me stumped for ages. Before I started the game, I reconfigured all the controls for movement to the cursor keys. When I first went to the World Map, I couldn't move the ship - so I didn't think that you actually could. However, I just wasn't getting anywhere when sailing in real-time. After hitting keys randomly on the World Map, it turns out that the WASD keys moved the ship - I double-checked my custom control configuration, and nothing was set to use those keys! Some people say that the sailing has a steep learning curve; I say that it is a victim of poor design.

Other annoyances are the shoddy combat on land; that fact that you initiate a conversation with one key and select the different responses with another; for some reason you cannot access all your status screens when you have your sword drawn; you can't access these screens when on the World Map either, which is stupid. You can only travel between islands in this mode, yet you cannot check your Quest Book to remind you which island you are supposed to be going to. So, you have to enter the Sailing Mode (which needs to be loaded off the hard drive) to have a look. However, in the sailing mode you cannot save your game - but you can when on the World Map.

On and on and on...

Where shall we go today?

Although at first it seems that there is loads to do, it all becomes rather repetitive after a while. That fact that each island and building interior are so similar almost reminds you of the old games of Pac Man that would replay the same levels but in different colour. I found the sea combat to get a bit boring after a while, although you can speed everything up. There is very little to the sword fighting, with you just getting into a routine of block-strike-block-strike the whole time.

Despite this, the game can be compelling and the story is rather interesting (even if there are various spelling mistakes in the character dialogue). The game is certainly above average as a whole, but it could have been so much better. Much of it feels bolted on as an afterthought and those expecting another Morrowind-style epic will be very disappointed.