Sid Meier’s Pirates! works really well as an open world game on the PSP.
The game plays very simple. You control a ship and sail from city to city around the Caribbean Sea. When you arrive at any given city, all you get is a menu of where you want to go. You can speak to the governor to get a status update on that particular faction like who are the allies and enemies. You can head into a tavern and talk to a few people to get some quests or tips on the latest happenings, or recruit some extra crew members. You can also trade with merchants, or make upgrades to your ships. When you are done, just sail off and you are in control of your ship again, sailing the light blue seas. There are many cities in the Caribbean, and all of them are presented the same exact way, except the colors of everyone’s clothes will be different depending on the faction that controls the city, which include the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch.
Whiling sailing out at sea, you will come across many other ships doing their own business, and you can choose to attack any one of them. When you are attacking a ship, all you do is fire cannons at it until the ship sinks or they surrender. You can also smash your ship into theirs and duel with the head captain of that ship. After you win the battle, you can recruit some members of the losing team, take the goods that were on that ship, and even keep the ship for your own use. All of this plays very well and the overall experience is a very fun one.
As you play the game, years will pass, and you will eventually want to retire or else you will be forced into retirement. The game will then calculate your post retirement profession, based on what you have done in the game. You can end up being anything from a poor old washed up beggar, to the governor of a city with tons of money and popularity. Everything you do is a result of your decisions, and you can play the game any way you like.
The issues I had were less to do with actual gameplay and more to do with presentation. While the graphics are very solid, the minigames for finding the buried treasures and lost cities had a very different look to them. They are top down maze-like minigames in which you control your pirate around a jungle with patrolling lions. Everything was badly modeled and animated even worse. On sea, when nearing a city, the music of the faction that controls the city will begin to play. It’s a very nice touch, but if you are not near any city, there is no music at all. The only thing you will hear is a chime which indicates a month has passed. I’m on a ship with a couple hundred crew members on it. At least give me an occasional pirate-themed flute melody. Another problem I had was the wind direction never changed throughout my time playing. I could not have done something wrong, because I shouldn’t be in control of something like the wind. It is either a coincidence, or something is wrong. Either way, traveling eastward was always a pain for me because I had to sail into the wind. Sid Meier’s Pirates! works really well as an open world game on the PSP. The quests are short, the load times are quick, and the gameplay works in that you can play it for a few minutes and make progress before turning it off. This is a port of recent remakes on the Xbox and PC. If you played the remake, then you know what to expect. For a non-linear game, it works very well. However, this game is strictly non-linear. There really is no story and the game does not push you to do anything in particular. The options are simply there, and it is up to you to come up with the motivations. In that respect, Pirates! is not fully recommendable, but is worth checking out just the same.