Woo! Pirates is a re-release of an old classic from a few years back and it has been tweaked with better graphics, sound and other bits and bobs.
The basic storyline is that you are some little kid whose family is arrested and turned into slaves by an evil count and you swear vengeance and vow to rescue them from their fate and kick the evil count’s ass…as one does. The story skips ahead 10 years when the kid is all grown up and takes up a job as a sailor on board a merchant ship with a tyrannical captain in charge. After the crew mutinies you become the captain, raise your Jolly Roger and the game begins!!
The game is REALLY easy and intuitive to play. You basically move your ship across the ocean and intercept other ships and, well, blow the **** out of them with your cannons, board them, steal whatever they have on board and then, depending on the state of the boat, sink it or commandeer it to join your little fleet. You can upgrade your ships to carry different types of ammunition (grape, chain or balls) which affect the enemy in different ways. How you use these varying types of ammo can hugely affect the outcome of a battle.
Dotted around the Caribbean are a huge number of ports, each belonging to one of four different factions; English, Dutch, Spanish and French. The countries are ALWAYS at war with each other so it really pays to pay attention what is going on with the game politics as if France is at war with England and you are mainly preying on English ships then the merchants at the French ports will have better prices for your goods, there will be more men willing to join your fleet in the taverns and the French governors will be more likely to let you get it on with their daughters.
Oh yea, I probably should make mention of that little fact…
This game isn’t just about pillaging, revenge and random acts of violence…the hero also gets the chance to get his groove on with several young wenches around the Caribbean. Hoorah! I am ashamed to admit that I still haven’t managed to score with any of the ladies *as yet* (I’m working on it, dammit). The first thing they will ask you to do is accompany them to a ball and you have to dance with them and follow their dance steps. They will point in a direction and you have to press the corresponding key on your keyboard. If you totally suck and have zero rhythm (ahem) then they will basically give you the brush off. If you somehow manage to impress them then they put you through a few more trials, including fighting a duel with their fiancé?! To be honest I’m not sure I want to get into a relationship with a woman who wants me to beat the snot out of her betrothed…but I guess things were different back then.
There are other fun aspects to the game as well; searching for buried treasure is always fun, fighting other famous pirates to become the most feared pirate on the seas and raising enough men to attack and capture a port are a few of the other things that you can do to while away the time whilst you search for your family.
The graphics are really nice to look at and the game runs pretty smoothly on a 1.8ghz PC although it does tend to lag a bit here and there. There is also a huge pirate dictionary included in the game so you can learn about some of the most pirates in history (Captain Blackbeard was one hardcore double-bastard motherf***er according to the dictionary … ay carumba) as well as some of the ships and equipment in use at the time.
I really enjoyed this game for a while but I found that the whole thing got pretty repetitive after a while. Most of the enemy ships rarely pose much of a challenge and once you have got yourself a nice ship (Royal Sloop, baby, yeah!) you are pretty much invincible and you can take on anyone, including those massive 40 gun war galleons. The game is open-ended so you can spend as much time doing what you want without even bothering to look for your family. You can declare complete and total war on one country if you want and just spend your entire time blowing the living snot out of their ships for the pure hell of it…sorry about that, Spain…or you can spend your time trading (boring), pillaging (woot) and getting it on with the ladies (even if they all are money grubbing, back stabbing trollops…grr). All in all, its good fun for a while but probably not enough to keep you playing indefinitely.
James Coghlan
