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Severely limited and absolutely no replayability

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 20, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I've never played the original Sid Meier's Pirates! but I have played "Cutthroats", which I found to be very lavish and expansive, despite severe limitations regarding commanding troops to besiege cities and other sorts of details.

This one has rather good graphics for a relatively small game, and plays well and fluidly. For my taste, it has far too great of a cartoonishness to it, which severely limits the potential for it to be as violent and cutthroat as... well, "Cutthroats". There's no throatcutting in this one---just a swing on a rope, a HAHA!, and a smirk as the enemy shakes his fist and goes "OOOH YOUUU!"

The campaigns as well follow an utterly ridiculous task of "Find Baron Montalbon" or whatever his name is, whom you defeat in battle and he gives you ONE PIECE of a multi-piece map to find a family member of yours. THEN you must track him down AGAIN (because you're apparently too stupid to have him tell you EVERYTHING then kill him) to get ANOTHER piece of that one map. Once you have all the pieces, you rescue your family member, never see them again, and have to hunt down THE SAME PERSON AGAIN AND AGAIN FOR MORE MAP PIECES for family members ranging from Aunts, Sisters, Fathers, Mothers, etcetera.

Then there's ridiculous quests involving lost cities and hunting down famous pirates from history all just smashed together in whatever year you pick. Despite supposedly gaining "infamy" for killing these famous pirates, you don't get anything except the number 1 slot on most famous pirates, and a lot of money.

A surprising feature which seems to severely limit my actions is that as soon as you start to gain successes, commanding multiple ships with a hundred or more men and lots of gold, morale starts going down the crapper at breakneck speed, to a point where even getting vast amounts of gold can't solve it---your best result is to either kill them off in pitched battles, or retire for a short while. This eats away a few years of your life before you return with a smaller crew and smaller ship.

About the only aspects of gameplay which are always entertaining are ship battles and turn-based, grid-based land battles. Ship battles are real time, involving simultaneous use of steering and sluggish firing to break down your enemy's ship and either destroy it, or board and force a surrender or fight it out on deck, where surprisingly your forces always seem to die quicker than the enemy's, no matter what. Land battles are particularly fun in execution and strategy.

But these are very, very small aspects of a broader game, which most of the time is spent sailing (and the wind almost always blows in one direction for months endlessly, making sailing take a LOT of gametime) and visiting cities to do the exact same dreck---get a few minor upgrades to your ships, sell some cargo, visit the tavern to recruit some random bandits, speak to a cloned barmaid about whatever (usually she doesn't give you anything important, just "ooh you so scary you is numba 1 pirate in the evar", or talk to some random guy in a corner offering valuable things like jewelry or maps or information).

Then there's DANCING! Every major town has a governor who has a daughter, who comes in three formats: "Plain", "Attractive", "Beautiful". Every time you visit, you do a little Olde English dance to Baroque harpsichord music, and you must press buttons properly in sequence or trip over your own clownshoes. She basically falls in love with you based on your dancing, giving her stuff, and killing her suitors. I haven't yet discovered if this has any relevance to the overall gameplay at all or is just an excuse to add another minigame into it complete with more cleavage.

Once you've reached an old age and are too sick to pirate (it will always be sickness that forces you to retire), you cannot continue on with your character. But really, you wouldn't want to. New games, no matter if you start in 1620, 1640, 1660, or 1680, are exactly the same as one another, with the exact same quests, games, technology, and pirates. This is a dumbed-down, kiddie-friendly version of historical piracy in the Carribean, and as such you don't get to "live the life" of a REAL pirate, complete with kidnapping, butchering people, scurvy, ransoming people for medical supplies (actual event: Blackbeard ransomed people for medicine), sex, drinking (Black Bart Roberts died because his ship was ambushed while his men were all drunk), etcetera.

Even Pirates of the Carribean was more violent and realistic than this game.

Being that they are of the same genre, I have to compare Cutthroats with Pirates. In Cutthroats, you can invade cities with massive armies of your men, including with cannons taken off your ship, have townspeople try to fight you off, then surrender and you can take them prisoner or execute them (including women and children), you have to keep your ship supplied not only with food but with gunpowder for the cannons, accessories like sugar and rum and tobacco for the men's morale, you have to buy guns and grenades and pistols if you want to arm your men for personal combat, lifeboats if you want your men to survive when the ship sinks, and wait in harbor for your ship to be repaired if damaged.

In Pirates, all you need is food and cannons. Everything else is provided, and repairs are done instantaneously. While landbattles are fun, they are only more fun than in "Cutthroats" because in "Cutthroats", the map is huge, and your men move at a snail's pace quite literally. There's no murdering, raping, pillaging, or anything that was synonymous with pirates.

A shell of what could have been a great game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Sid Meier's Pirates is a mixed bag. The game is fun to play for a few days, but it's incredibly short and with little replay value unless you enjoy doing the same thing over and over again. It promises exploration and excitement, but delivers long periods of waiting for the wind to pick up and propel your war galleon across the sea. It supposedly has four different time periods of piracy to play in, but the only difference is in the level of fun, not difficulty or content. You get to swordfight with scurvy pirate captains, sneak into towns, attack towns and install new governors, trade goods, attack ships, buy items, recruit crew members, search for treasure and your long lost family, and even ballroom dance. The main problem is that every aspect of the game is simplified to its basic elements and rendered repetitious.

In the long run, the game is best for gamers who don't like to spend a lot of time on games. Pirates is fairly easy to play for a few minutes and come back to whenever you want without having to remember a lot of details. Unfortunately for me, the repetitious nature of the game has become far too tedious.

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