Such a waste of potential
So what if the movie was disappointing? The game didn't have to be this bad as well.
The art and character design are superb, but it seems like the developers put so much effort into the look of the game, they forgot to actually make a game that was fun and playable.
The sword fights are pathetically easy and there's little or no enemy AI, so the developers take the usual cheap way of adding some modicum of difficulty by swarming you with enemies or having you have to build up some lame meter before you can launch an attack on some of the intermediate enemies. The puzzles are not too challenging and end up sometimes being more frustrating, since to prolong the game, they make it so you know where you have to go, but you have to maneuver so precisely with the wonky controls, that you will end up repeating several relatively uninteresting segments ad nauseum before getting through.
Some of the cutscenes will make you laugh, not intentionally, mind you, its just that they are so badly done as to border on camp. It looks like the moviemakers gave the game development team just a gist of the plot, the result being that the execution of the cutscenes gives you something totally different from the movie, like when Jack Sparrow realizes he has to flip over the Black Pearl to get out of the land of the dead -- except in the game the crew just stand there and watch him running back and forth across the deck as he SINGLE HANDEDLY capsizes the ship! That's bust-a-gut hilarious.
There is also some busy-work in the game like collecting items to unlock abilities. However, extra abilities are meaningless as the fighting engine is so simplistic, you won't need them unless you are really desperate for gaming achievement points.
For fans of the "Pirates" movies, this is a great collectible, because the characters are so beautifully rendered and the environments are gorgeous.
The only problem is there's just not much of a game to play here.