Sid Meier’s Pirates! – Review

Suddenly fashionable again since the Johnny Depp movie, Pirates are cool, but does the remake of Sid Meier’s retro classic hold its own on the Xbox platform?

The game story is essentially a tale of revenge as a young boy watches the evil Marquis take his family out of their comfortable and happy home. 10 years later you are said young boy and you can seek your revenge. At the beginning of this game I immediately though ‘hmm is that a little simmish speak in there I spot? Perhaps I am going to like being a pirate afterall’, although of course I’m a male pirate, despite desperately wanting to be a kick ass girl pirate… oh well. Essentially you have the usual options at start-up and will create a new pirate which you will name and so on. You can choose from five different difficulty settings from apprentice right through to swashbuckler. You can also choose various skills like fencing, medicine, wit and charm, one of which will be your forte. You then have to sign aboard with a nation, your choices are the English, French, Spanish and Dutch. I chose the English for no particular reason. I wont spoil it for you but my long and arduous climb to captain was far shorter than anticipated and so the game truly begins….

Gameplay was more strategic than I’d expected and this set me back somewhat as I just wanted to get straight to the adventure elements of the game. This is definitely one of those rare titles where you’ll be forced to read or at least look at the dreaded manual or be left floundering in high seas unsure of what to do. That said once you’re on your way the gameplay is addictive in nature and you will find yourself up for one more battle or one more search and destroy mission time and again, at least for a few days. Despite my initial concerns regarding the strategic aspects of this title it turned out to be easy strategy and is in no way over complicated even when you’re further into the game during land battles. I liked the way this title also mixed things up; you can be strategising one second, one on one sword fighting the next or dancing at a grand ball where you need to press the right buttons to impress the ladies, these differing game types kept things fresh, at first.. oh there’s those words again ‘at first’.

A helpful addition to the game is that you can consult you ‘pirate-odedia’ for all manner of information about in game happenings. This helps a lot and gives useful hints and tips throughout, as well as various information about pirates, ships and more. It appears quite a bit of effort was put in regarding background information, which, if you can be bothered will also see you learning as you play but, oh there had to be one, other information such as prior discussions with bar wenches and information gleaned I could not find, so many things went by the wayside.

Graphically the game is very pretty although I didn’t see anything that made my jaw drop, it was all fairly par for the course. Obviously given this is essentially a port of the classic Commodore 64 version, graphics have come on somewhat since those days, but that aside there’s nothing here which will leave your Xbox console struggling, which just makes the fact this title suffers with some severe slowdown and glitches all the more strange. Water obviously plays a huge part in this title given the sailing sections and as water effects go these are nice but not mind blowing. Character models too are ‘nice’. Ship detailing is pretty good and it’s easy to tell the differing ship types apart even in overhead view. All in all though the lack of variation was a bit of a let down and although characters do differ visually (differing uniforms, clothing) they’re all essentially the same, be it the ballroom dancing, tavern visits or governors office and I couldn’t help but feel had the characters and locales differed to a greater degree this would have added to this title greatly and perhaps masked the fact that you’re essentially doing the same tasks over and over again.

The sound in this title is really good with full 5.1 support. The in game speech is more like simmish (the language used in the Sims games) than anything else as the characters mumble odd syllables here and there that amount to nothing understandable. For the deaf or hard of hearing gamer this means they don’t miss out on chunks of spoken story as everything is explained in text on screen including various objectives. The musical score in Sid Meier’s Pirates is actually pretty good and very in keeping with the overall swashbuckling genre. Music differs dependent on what’s happening onscreen so you have the battle music, ballroom music and so on. The actual sound effects are really well done and the surround sound does indeed deserve a mention in its own right, cannons blast and swords clash, all in glorious 5.1. Once again this section of the game is only let down by lack of variety, though it won’t ruin the game for you overall.

The female gamer once more doesn’t get to play a female character, what with all pirates being male apparently. You’ll also have plenty of buxom tavern wenches or governors daughters to flirt with along the way but it doesn’t really show women as anything other than secondary characters. It would have been so cool to play a kick ass female pirate though (and yes there were a few in reality so why not give us girls the choice!).

Overall I’ve found my time with Pirates to be both a lot of fun and highly frustrating. Given my accidental ‘retirement’ where I thought I could keep playing my character later on only to discover this wasn’t a save function but meant I could no longer play this character was annoying, albeit my own fault. If you do retire, you’ll lose the chance to play that character for good. It’ll give you a little story about their subsequent life and basically that’s that. It is good and bad at the same time, it’s funny but also really sad that you realize you’ve lost your little character for good. Now this poses some problems. One, when do you stop playing and two, why can’t you continue when it suits you rather than the developers. Another negative aspect of this title and my reason for only giving it a 3.5 as opposed to a 4 – that it’s presently receiving elsewhere – is the sheer amount of repetitive cut and transitional scenes throughout. These are essentially all the same with merely different character overlays which can be become boring. When you first board an enemy ship it’s fun to fight but when you’re seeing the same cut scenes again and again it saddens you a little and this becomes more tedious the more you play. It’s no fun knowing exactly how to beat each pirate. Damn it. I want to keep having fun with this but I do feel that it’s lacking in certain areas. Add to this the terrible frame rate or indeed full on juddering from time to time and this title slips from brilliant status to another above average fun game with a few problems. That’s not to say it’s all bad by any means, this is a fun, addictive title and at least it’s offering us something different to the many FPS, War and driving titles seemingly drowning the Xbox in recent months. At the very least I’d give this title a rent because you will spend a lot of hours with it, though replayability is probably not up to much. Pirates could have been outstanding but the fun you have playing it is ultimately tarnished by the irritating little points mentioned above that could have been fixed. It’s a damn shame as I really want to love this title… but I’d say I’m more liking it than loving it. Sigh.

Review by Tracy