Addictive, but bugged :(
The combat system of naval battle is far better. You can sink or capture other vessels as you wish. Now i hav'nt tried to raid a city yet but is possible to do it.
The trade system is not bad also. I like games like that, ehrer you can buy goods low and try to sell them higher elsewhere, buying bigger ships and raising a fleet while doing it. There's a lot of goods to trade, however economy is not dynamic so let's say you buy a lot of Wine at Port of Spain, what,s remaining instore should cost higher to buy later, but it doesnt. Some games do this, this one isnt.
You can manage a lot of officers to help you out in different task, however attributes and skills are a bit questionning.
The manual is no big help there to understand the attribute's growth of the character. And since it's a russian title, i don't know if the english version is good, but i can say that the french written translation is rather poor (and vocal is non existent)
And the worse, it is bugged. A lot. SAVE OFTEN, as the game freeze from time to time for no reason. (e.g. dont try to switch to windows while ingame with the Windows key or alt-tab-whatever, it always freeze). The worse about it though, there is no patch available to fix it. There is one for the russian version, but none for the multi-language version.
Also, that's the second opus. The first Age of Pirates: Caribbean tales was good, and there is no major changes in AOP2. In fact, AOP1 was better as it was not bugged, but shorter in length. But now you cannoy play AOP1 if you have more than 2gig of RAM. AOP2 seems to be neverending.
So, for someone who like trade and naval battles, and who accept going over the bugs, it's not a bad game at all!
And for the other people, just stay away from this game!