Fun for a while, but very repetitive. The game feels like a bunch of mini games all wrapped up into one large game.
User Rating: 7.5 | Sid Meier's Pirates! XBOX
The game play is fun at first, the interactive battles, the small RTS (Real Time Strategy) elements, naval battles, dancing with governor‘s daughters, following pieces of pirate map, navigating vast seas. All of it is decently thought out and plays fairly smoothly. However, about 10 hours into the game you start feeling like you've done this way too many times already. Reused animations, sounds, and the lack of voice acting, especially how all the cities look and play basically the same. Music is pretty good though, definitely fits the theme of the game. The graphics have an almost Disney-like “cartoonish” look, which gives it, it‘s own feel that adds to the feel of mischievous pirates, and stereotypical looks for each nationality. Characters have a lot of expression, which some of them are sadly over used. Decent textures for how small everything is in scale, and the first time you smash into another boat with canon fire and watch the little crewmen fall off of their ship is very satisfying. The game has many good moments that are engaging, but has almost a party-game like feel to it. The chores in each city feel the same, you can ignore them but there are consequences for denying them. Naval battles are fun, decent amount of ships and varying forms of smuggling, looting and such gives the game a feeling of different ways to make money, but sadly money is so abundant you‘ll find yourself rich just looting other boats. The nice thing about varying ammo like chain shot, grapeshot and such is that you can make a ship surrender, by attacking their sails, or their crew and leaving the hull in tact. That’s nothing new to the whole “Pirate” theme as far as video games go though. I personally found this game to be quite easy, even on some of the harder difficulty settings. It’s way too easy to just sail around and find a really, really powerful ship within the first hour or two of the game. From that point on Naval battles are cake to go through. Even the toughest of pirates, or pirate hunters for that matter will get crushed in just a few bursts of canon fire, gold will start flowing in until you have a surplus. You never keep the same crew, you’ll find yourself splitting the “Booty” at the end of every long voyage and starting from scratch again. Doesn't take long to get straight to the action, which is good. Of course, once you play through the game once. Playing again after that is taxing, although can be fun for people who just want to play around and perhaps conquer tons of cities/ports, just sink and raid ships rather than follow the in game missions. All the mission locations, quests are randomized so each time you play the game it will feel just a little different (Sometimes frustrating when it comes to navigation.). While there are a vast things to do, it all happens very quickly. Some of these mini game like duels and such will only take perhaps 2-5 minutes if even that. dueling pirate captains suddenly becomes simple when you get your hands on the right items. It gets redundant quickly, so quickly that you'll find yourself sighing every time an undesirable button sequence 'game' comes up. There isn't much of a story line (despite what people tell you) It's basically what you make it. If you spend a lot of time finding a wife, saving all family members, collecting pieces of maps, (For yet more gold to your surplus) killing bandits, rival pirate captains... sure, there is some story, but it's not very original and very self motivated. I wasn't extremely impressed by Sid Meier's Pirates. However, I can see how it would appeal to certain types of gamers. If you have the patience for all the little chores, then this could be a wonderful experience.
