Though it can get quite repetitive after awhile, Port Royale offers an excellent trading and fighting game.
User Rating: 8.1 | Port Royale PC
Port Royale, as with quite a few other games, puts you in the Carribbean during the 16th and 17th centuries. However, Port Royale allows you to control numerous convoys of ships (up to 20) to send out to patrol the seas in search of pirates, or to send them on trading missions via trading routes. You can also buy a builders liscense in a few towns and build your own businesses to either sell directly to the town, or store it and allow your ships to trade them with towns in need of it. The graphics are nice, overall, yet not outstanding. Cities look pretty good, all with nice animations for most buildings and citizens and gaurds walking around. The water looks quite good too, with water that reflects ships and also moves up and down imitating waves. Ships look decent though a bit plain and uninteresting. Sound is the same way, nice but not great. They don't hurt the game in any way, though they certainly don't help it any. The game itself can be quite complicated and requires a decent amount of time to learn how to play it. The tutorial does a decent job of explaining how to do things, but not how to do it well, that's left up to you to figure out and can take quite some time. However, once you do figure it out the game becomes quite entertaining since the game is open-ended and allows you to persue whatever path you want. Wether you want to go about building businesses in a town or hunting down pirates, it's up to you. Port Royale provides you with 60 towns and a fairly large portion of the Carribbean to do this in. Trading and fighting require you to make convoys, which is a group of up to 10 ships wich requires a captain a minimum crew. If you plan on making a fighting convoy, you'll also have to equip cannons, extra crew for boarding ships, swords, and optionally muskets. However, to get all that you'll have to travel to quite a few different islands and have a pretty deep pockets, and preferably a decent amount of trading convoys bringing in some money. Thankfully you won't have to manually control all these convoys and instead can set up patrolling or trading routes. It takes a little while to set one up since you have to add each city you want your convoy to visit from a list, and unless you've memorized every city in the game, you'll probably have to keep switching back and forth between the map and the trading route menu. Thankfully, though, the trading route menu gives a good amount of options to make a trading route that should fit your needs. After awhile Port Royale can get quite repetitive since there just isn't that much to it. Yes, you can trade numerous items, build buildings, and fight pirates, but there just isn't that much to keep you coming back after you've done each a few times. Still, that won't happen for quite awhile, especially if you only play it in moderation (i.e. not 6 hours at a time). Port Royale is one of the best Carribbean trading simulations I've played yet, and I'd recommend it to anyone who has an interest of this time period.
