I've always liked Pirate games. Sadly this one does not live up to it's potential. My in-depth review.
In short, for those uninterested in reading all of this: It's like Sid Meier's Pirates! combined with Oblivion, but without balancing or streamlining the user interface. Sounds awesome, but it's brutally difficult and time consuming. You'll spend more time navigating menus than you will playing.
Pros: Pirate game. A lot of potential. Free Roam. Good concept.
Cons: Too much time wasted on simple, routine tasks. Overly difficult. Horrible interface.
Now, on to my review.
Presentation:
The graphics are pretty dated, but not horrible. The sound is pretty uninspired, but also not horrible. However, there is a harsh click noise that plays when you are buying/moving cargo and such that I found very irritating. I was using closed-ear headphones and after awhile that noise really started to get to me. I know it sounds petty, but I've never really had that problem before. Fortunately I was able to delete the sound file for this event so it's silent now. Without headphones it may not be so bad. The music is very good though.
The writing in the conversations is well done. The voice acting overall is good, but some of it is out of place. In a naval battle, your officer shouldn't say "Left side ready to fire!" he should instead say "Port side ready to fire!"
Wandering around the islands feels contained and artificial. You'll walk from "zone to zone" - small areas a couple hundred feet across, load, and enter another. The terrain differences are minimal. I do understand there is probably a lot of land in the game, but I don't see the need for the small room-to-room loading screen every 15-25 seconds of running around with the amount of RAM and other resources today's computer have. And the musical score restarts every transfer so it just adds to the problem. It loads fast, but it breaks flow. The towns are far larger and more complex than these wilderness zones, so this whole design baffles me.
Difficulty:
The game is aggressively difficult which I did not expect when I saw so many difficulty levels. I started out on the default (lowest) difficulty and it's downright brutal in the early part of the game. And in general I'm pretty good at most any game I put my mind to, as I've been playing them since the early 80s.
On foot the swordplay works out pretty good but it's a little repetitive and unlike ship combat, it gets pretty easy as you level up. Ship combat is hit and miss when it comes to funfactor. It's hard to get started because your shots are so inaccurate. Many enemies target your sails and when you're low level that cripples your moment, especially if you're in a "high level" ship. Larger, advanced ships will incur a penalty on your stats if you're to far a level below it. I was in a ship that gave me a -2 to all my main stats and if my sails got to about 65% I could only turn and not move forward at all. I haven't seen any indicator that shows what ships are within your level and which are out of it, so it's trial and error. Getting out of combat can be really annoying when you have extra ships in your fleet. There have been times where I have been stuck in combat for 6-9 minutes real time - while running the game at 6x speed - before my AI ships finally got away from a fort or some other ship in the area and I could return to the map screen and sail away. Other times it goes smoothly and things work out and it's fun. It seems to get better as you level.
There are far, far too many ships wandering around and many of them are going to be aggressive to you. This is doubly bad because it's very common for them to travel in large groups and they can pull you into combat from a quite a distance away. Unless you are much faster than your attacker and you want to escape it consumes a lot of time (even with the games time acceleration) to get away. So much that if I got attacked and II knew I couldn't win or escape, I found it much more desirable to load a save game from before. Really.
Gameplay, Design, and Interface:
I am a very patient person, but this game wastes SO much time on elements of the game that aren't particularly fun, such as frequently replenishing your food and rum stores. It just gets worse the more ships you get in your fleet. I am quite certain I've spent more time moving cargo and buying food than playing the rest of the game. Even getting a good sized crew takes forever. I assume once your reputation improves it becomes easier but that doesn't help much when you're struggling during the beginning to get going. Also, trying to find the "main quest line" for your character can be confusing as well as the objectives. I was told to transport some Duke, and was told he was in a house and given the family name of the house. But I have NO idea where this house is, what city it's in, what island, nothing. I have no idea where to look. I looked in each and every house in the town I was given it and he was no where to be found.
Sailing at see, it'd be nice to be able to get some information about the other ships around you. What ship type (when it's close enough) and how many before you're close enough to get pulled into combat.
There are events where rats will eat your cargo over time. This would be fine if it were restricted to food, fruits, an other reasonable cargo. But when I see a message that rats devoured some WEAPONS I just want to talk to the person who put that in and say, dude, really? They ate my guns and gunpowder? Rats? So, you had to take time out of balancing and improving the game to program this silliness? Suddenly, the rest of the issues are less surprising.
In combat, I couldn't find a way to specify which ship I wanted to shoot at. It looks like when you click fire, it just shoots at whatever ship is nearest. I also could not find a way to target sails, deck, or hull. There are different ammunition types of course, but I can't fathom a reason to not have more specific targeting.
The interface is very poorly optimized. It takes many clicks, buttons and buttons to do just about everything, even trading equipment to your officers is a chore. And when you're done with a particular officer or ship, you have to close the window back out to the main screen and start all over again. There doesn't seem to be a way to shift seamlessly between them or just back up to the previous window and select a different transfer target.
Technical Issues:
I've checked other sources, and it seems that for everyone the game will crash every time if you try to alt tab out of it. You have to run it in a window if you are a multitasker. I get quite a few random crashes playing it as well. I don't have these issues on any other game that I play and I keep my system in good shape.
The bottom line:
The game has a lot of potential for great fun. But in my opinion it needs a lot more work before that is possible. The concept is there but for as long as I've seen this has been out, they've already abandoned it. There still is some underlying fun, but it's constantly buried under the tedium of the time consuming disastrous interface and difficulty due clumsy combat and overpopulation of hostile vessels traveling in groups that will pursue you seemingly forever. You have to be much faster or try to get them caught up on landmasses. It's especially tiresome when you are being chased by a ship that's only barely slower than you, or about the same speed. You can be kept "in combat" for lengthy periods of time, unable to transfer cargo between your ships and such.
I don't recommend this game, in it's current state, to anyone who isn't extremely into pirate games and has a lot of patience and free time.