A strategy game that will keep your fingers busy at the keyboard...
The original Port Royale was released last June. It was difficult, engaging, difficult, provided good depth, and above all it was difficult. I’d venture a guess to say that anyone who wasn’t an absolute strategy fanatic lamented the game’s toughness. Port Royale 2 improves the core gameplay of the original while still maintaining the challenge that highlighted the first.
In Port Royale 2 you have to rise from a humble trader to a successful businessman. Don’t let that exciting premise detract you from the game though. To accomplish this goal you have to navigate the waters of the Caribbean circa 1600, where the Spanish, Dutch, English, and French are all vying for power. There are four primary ways to acquire wealth in the game: missions, trading, production, and combat (read: piracy).
When you start in free play mode, you are aligned to one nation. That nation and all its colonies will be friendly to you. Unless there is a declaration of war against your nation, foreign ports will remain open to you and military convoys won’t harass you. In your starting colony you are given a warehouse to store goods, a ship with an empty hold, some gold, and a map of the colonies. You can also choose which strength you want to start off with. The strengths vary from receiving discounts on traded goods, doing more damage in combat, and even being able to gain reputations in colonies from successful battles.
Your ships are the primary way of conveyance in the game. You can command a single vessel, a convoy of up to ten ships, and depending on your rank in the game, you can hire captains and head up multiple convoys. Your ships can be catered to your style of play—keep them empty to hold as many goods as possible or load them up to the brim with cannons and make trading convoys fear your very sight. Using your map, you can set sail to dozens of colonies scattered throughout the Caribbean. Once you’ve reached a port, the money-making begins.
With limited capital initially, trading will be your primary way of making money. Trading is simple as supply and demand. You can trade goods where they are produced to colonies where they are most needed. In addition, the price of goods varies from nation to nation. The price of wheat may be substantially higher for French colonies than that of the Dutch so buying wheat produced in a Dutch colony and selling it in some depleted French colonies will yield a massive profit. As you advance in the game and acquire more than one convoy you can even set up trading routes. It’s an automated process that’s very simple to set up. If given a trading route, a convoy will automatically trade the goods you specify, make money, and leave you free to concentrate on the other aspects of the game like building your own production facilities.
Building businesses, for the most part, is a simple task. When you start out, you can only construct buildings in your original starting colony. This is because you already have a building permit there. To acquire building permits in other colonies you have to do a certain amount of trading with them and build up a reputation. In fact, building up your reputation opens multiple doors with the colonies. It allows you to speak with foreign governors, take loans out from colony treasuries and overall makes things a lot easier for you. Once you can speak to a governor you can accept missions from him. The missions are normally variations on trading, combat, and construction.
To construct a business all you have to do is find the master builder and tell him what you want to build. For a fee all you have to do is give him the supplies he needs and he’ll start construction right away. If you don’t have all the supplies then you can simply purchase them immediately from the town that you’re in. If the town lacks the necessary supplies they you can bring in everything you need from other colonies. Once your business is built you have to bring in workers from other colonies if none are available where you are. Transport your workers, build them a residence and you’re on your way to profit. Goods that are produced are automatically stored in your warehouse and you can even toggle at what capacity you want your businesses to operate. There’s no sense in paying wages to a full compliment of workers if their product isn’t in demand. If what you have doesn’t satisfy your greed then you can always take others by force.
What would a high seas game be without combat? Port Royale 2 allows you to take whatever you want when you want it—there are some consequences however. There are two types of convoys—military and trading—trading convoys normally have a single escort ship with one or more unarmed vessels filled with goods. Military convoys are colonial bad asses with five fully armed ships ready to take anything suspicious out. If you start assaulting convoys left and right then you’ll have every nation’s military hunting you down, taking your stuff, and generally making life very miserable for you. You can attack shipping legally though by obtaining a letter of marque from a governor. This essentially allows you to attack the shipping of one nation without any penalty from anyone else. Military convoys of that nation will still hunt you down but it’s easier to avoid one nation than three.
Combat is fairly simple, you have one ship, three types of ammunition, and a boarding party. Sail your ship up to the enemy, heavy shot is your basic cannonball and will sink the enemy ship when its health reaches zero. Chain shot will crush their masts and bring them to a painfully slow speed. Grape shot litters the decks with musket balls and cuts down the sailors. If you want to capture a ship you simply order your sailors to prepare to board and ram into the ship. A simulated fight ensues and generally speaking the greater number of sailors wins the battle. However, if the enemy captain is on board he can challenge you to a duel to decide the fate of the battle.
The duels are just the first of a few main problems with the game. The duels boil down to simple timed clicking. Once you learn the mechanics of them in the first duel you face, the rest of them will seem extremely simple. There are some faults with other aspects of combat as well. Did I mention that you get to command one ship at a time while the enemy can throw up to five ships at you? These battles see your one ship duke it out with five enemies until it’s either sunk, captured, or you tell it to flee while you bring in another ship to replace it. It can get frustratingly hard to maneuver around while getting pounded from multiple sides. No matter where you turn there’s probably going to be an enemy ship there to inflict some sort of damage against you. The enemy AI is somewhat incompetent though and were it smarter then the 5 vs. 1 would be more of an issue.
Another detractor is the game’s way of managing time. You’ll often find yourself in debt from the numerous fees being collected. You’ll have to pay ships maintenance costs, captains fees, and sailor and worker wages. All these are taken out in a regular cycle of days. The problem is that getting from colony to colony often takes several days and in some cases multiple cycles which can drain your bank account quickly. This is where the majority of the difficulty lay—staying out of debt. Casual gamers won’t like the amount of attention to each and every detail they have to spend on in order to be successful in the game. The game’s treasurers feared me as I would often take out loans to cover my costs and then never return to that colony to pay it off.
Given that all this game has is its gameplay you would think that the developers would have spent more time making it more accessible. The graphics aren’t going to win any awards but this game doesn’t need standout graphics in order to be fun. The character models seem generic and the models in the duels look flat, almost like pieces of paper. That being said, the frame rate is consistent and all the animations roll smoothly. If you’re going to have something look mediocre, you may as well have it be functional.
The sound features a few rousing tracks that make my inner-pirate self scream out a healthy “yaaarrrr.” My main beef is that the music will often cut out in combat scenarios if you spend a lot of time in them. It’s like the developers expected combat to take only a certain amount of time and if you go over that you get no battle music. Also, the sound clips of citizens are almost sporadically placed. The voice clips a few of the viceroys will play out as the text splashes on the screen but almost no other characters have voices.
Aside from free play mode, there are only the specific scenarios to go through. The scenarios actually are a good tool for newbies to the Port Royale series and will help them understand some of the more complicated and enveloping gameplay mechanics. There’s no multiplayer to speak of but it wouldn’t be relevant given the type of gameplay anyway.
Overall, Port Royale 2 offers a lot for the strategy gamer who loves to keep track of every intimate detail of his business operations. However, casual gamers will lose interest fast as their businesses crumble into a pile of debt. With so much effort concentrated on the gameplay aspect the developer may have wanted to spend more time tweaking the graphics and the sound to bring it up to par. Now I need to head back to San Juan to take out a loan and cross it off my list of ports to visit.