Whew......this game is tough to get a handle on. I was really frustrated with the learning curve as it took me a couple of hours to get a good feel for how the game plays and several more to become proficient. The graphics look as good as I had hoped and the water is freaking killer. The kewlest part of the game is when you are on the sea in a battle with other ships. Smoke, fire, water splashes, and the sea in general look gorgeous. The graphic detail on land is good and best described as between Splinter Cell and Turdok (Turok :) The melee combat is simple just like it is in Morrowind. You have blocks, slashes, and a firearm from the period. Thats it. As simple as that sounds though the combat is really tough. It feels like your playing a D&D dice game cuz the action is really based on how good of equipment you have and what your stats are instead of any real hand eye coordination. The land missions are similar to Morrowind as well in that you can walk all over the place and go into most buildings. Very kewl. It really helps you feel like your in the game. Learning all the buttons for land/sea based action is time consuming. You have different actions availiable to you depending on whether or not your in first/third person mode as well as land/sea mode. Its can be tough when your sailing your ship in combat depending on how obsessive you are with targeting. That plus learning all your options in the icon based menus takes time. I still dont know what everything in the compass means. Theres a whole lotta stuph going on in it. Another kewl part of the game is the gross amount of stats your character and ships can have. As you level up you get a few bonus points to assign to your character. Thing is, there are so many kewl attributes availiable its tough to pick which one you want to spend it on (Thats a good thing in my book). This is definitely a game that you would enjoy much more once you get your character built up some. Right now the difficulty level is steep. I get my tail kicked everytime I turn around. This could be a game that you could sink a TON of hours into. Depending on how you approach a ship battle it could take upwards of an hour for one battle. I had one like that with 5 ships total and it seemed like it only took a few minutes. Fun stuph. There are plenty of atmospheric effects in the game too. And they all look tight. If your out on the water at sunset its unfreakin-believable how kewl the sun looks shining off the water in real time. Plus when you get caught in a storm it looks like something straightout of "A Perfect Storm" the movie. I also ran into a killer waterspout that totally blew me away graphically. I really only have three main gripes with the game: One, sometimes there is noticeable studdering in gameplay. Its annoying but bearable. Two, the instructions are pretty thin and you end up learning most things by trial and error which really sucks (I ended up losing a dude and a kewl ship cuz I couldnt figure out the shipyard interface....confusing) Three, sometimes your quest log isnt very clear on where your objectives are so you end up cruising around for a hour trying to find it. Grrr. Bottomline, genre nerds like myself will totally love it. Only hook with this game if your willing to have some patients with it and learn how it plays. If you do, you will be well rewarded with a solid high seas RPG.
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