Pirates! Live the Life is a swashbuckler’s ultimate digital fantasy.
You play pirate John (or whomever you decide to name him). A privateer set out to find fortune and fame, along with the hearts of governor’s daughters. Along the way you will venture into English, French, Spanish and Dutch ports, venture into indigenous Indian villages, ancient Incan and Mayan cities, and friendly if misguided Jesuit colonies. One of my only complaints with Pirates! is the necessity of dancing with the governor’s daughters. I utterly hated the repetitive dance moves, the music, and the daughters! It’s necessary because they give you hints and objects if you woo them well enough, but beware the annoying dance floor. The gameplay is simple, and easy to quickly sit down and pick up, even if you’ve never played the original Pirates! Basically the entire game can be controlled with the keyboard, and most of it is done with the Numeric pad. There is a legend at the lower right that contains all your controls at all times, the F-keys (F1,F2,F3,etc) control your status windows for items, quests and fleet status. You can control a fleet of up to eight vessels on the high seas and hundreds (thousands if you’re particularly talented) of pirates in strategic land battles. The open sea is where you will spend most of your time, fighting the winds and navigating by ragged old maps (the in-game map is quite polished); in an effort to cross large stretches of water. Trips spanning months will make your crew unhappy, therefore you must keep a steady stream of booty to keep them happy on those long voyages. You’ll also find objects of luxury and wonder to make them happier on long voyages. There are 10 top pirates in the game, all with deadly ships and large well maintained crews, and their own special sword fighting tactics. One of your goals is to become number one on the top pirates list, the rest of the goals are mostly up to you, this game is extremely open ended and caters to almost any gamers desire to do what they want. You can spend your time blasting other ships into oblivion with your 48 cannon Ship of the Line pirate vessel, or ripping into the enemy’s sails so as not to damage the hull and the goods on board, making it easier to take bigger hauls of the loot. Or you can ram the enemy vessel and board their ship, where each crew faces off against each other as you face the enemy captain in one-on-one swordplay, where your reflexes, wits, and indeed weapons will win the day. If you’re not a fighting sort, you can alternately spend your time looking for buried treasure, or buying goods at low prices, sailing across the sea and selling them where they’re needed most at very high prices, and this can be quite profitable. You can also take it upon yourself as I did, to destroy the English and French and make the Spanish the dominate face of the Caribbean, by going to each town, making them angry enough to hunt you, and then attacking and destroying them in decisive land battles. Once the town is won, you can appoint a governor of your choosing (of a nation you’re affiliated with) and then worry about defending it and making it prosper. The only thing holding you back is time, your pirate ages and the months you spend at sea make him get older, slower, and it becomes much harder and almost impossible to win a sword fight. You can privateer into your golden years if you like, but you’ll find it increasingly (very) hard to find crew that wants to join an old man, and that your sword arm is so agonizingly slow you just want to jump off the plank on your own. If you loose the sword fight I might add, you lose your ships too. I’ve only scratched the surface of the gameplay in Pirates!: Live the Life, there are many more things to do and far more depth to be reached, however the beauty of it is that you don’t have to, you can spend your time doing whatever you want, and still be successful.
The graphics in Pirates! are very pretty, the lush blue ocean and all the little ambient details like the semi transparent water against the hull, the foam wake behind the boats, the dolphins riding the wake and jumping out of the water, the little white clouds and the storm clouds. It all adds to the atmosphere and the new graphics engine has done a very good job of making it feel like you’re in the Caribbean sailing on a pirate ship. The new 3D engine brings realism to the game, but still respects what made the original fun, and you’ll immediately see the old style graphics do not hinder the very thing that makes Pirates! what it is, amazing open ended gameplay.
The sound is just as enveloping as the new graphics engine and also is integral to making you feel like you are there. You hear ambient things like waves, birds, masts creaking, the wind blowing in the sails, storms, squalls, sails ripping with chain shot, the immersive audio bits are endless. My only complaint, and one that is only an annoyance because it’s pretty much necessary, is all the governors and their daughters that you talk to, are voiced but it isn’t speech, it’s more like old cartoons where they talk gibberish with fake gibberish accents. Annoying as this is, there isn’t much point in making them speak fluent Spanish or Dutch as nobody would understand it anyway, and it would have driven costs up for the voice talent. The replay value in Pirates! is one of its best features. Due to the open ended gameplay, the fact you can play in different time periods with different economic situations, and the different difficulty settings actually making it harder, it is a worthy title of the herald re-playable. Very addictive gameplay, and easy to pick up and go even if you have never played it before. The open ended non-linear gameplay keeps you coming back for more, but overall it’s just extremely fun. Everyone should try Pirates! Live the Life, even if they aren’t a big pirate fan, it’s just one of those games that is easy to enjoy. Good job again Sid.