Quick review to those interested:
I'm playing this game now and it is original and pretty fun. But its very easy once you know how to play and rather short. I completed all the quests and basically beat the game (you get to choose when youre done, it never truly ends until you die of old age) in about 8 hours on one of the harder difficulties.
The hardest part of the game to me was the romance. You need to dance by hitting keys at the appropriate times when the girl gives hand signals. It is really frustrating because 1 wrong step sets you back quite a lot. And 2 wrong steps and you failed to impress her. This is Dance Dance Revolution meets 17th century dancing. Its hard because sometimes her hand signals look very similar and she does them so fast, missed steps are easy to get.
One thing I find fun is the choice of boats. There are huge war ships like the Flag Galleon with 40 gun and 300 man capacity. And there are little Indian War Canoes with 8 cannons and 75 men. But whats fun is playing with the little war canoes and doing donuts around the war ships hammering away with your 8 little guns. If youre real good at dueling, just ram enemy ships right at the start of a fight and take out their captain. But I like sinking the enemy ships just by gunning them to pieces.
Dueling is simple, and rather disappointing. There are maybe 8 different dueling scenes which are fun the first time, but after you do each of them 20 times each you wonder why the hell they couldnt make it random or at least add some more. Even the 9 notorious pirates share the same 3 scenes. Other than that its basically a paper scissors rock game with the 3 different attacks. And there are also 3 different blocks to counter each of those attacks respectively. You can also taunt but it always ends up with them getting a free hit against you unless youre playing on the easiest of difficulties.
Another aspect of the game I really like is the politics, but it definitely needs some work. There are 4 nations at times all at war with one another. When you sink boats of one nation, the enemy nations love you and reward you with ranks and eventually land. The problem with this system is there is really no penalty for sinking the boats, only rewards. The governor of the nation whos boats you sank will mention the king wont be pleased, but they never actually do anything about it. At one point I sunk 20-30 French boats, and drove by a French harbor, and it fired on me. But after that I talked to the governor and he promoted me because while doing so I also sank a few English boats. I also have no idea why Portugal is not one of the nations seeing how important and powerful their navy was in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Overall this is a pretty good game, but I don't think its even close to worth the full price. If you want to try it out, wait till its in the $20 range (which I doubt will take long).
![Rocko[DPC]](/forums/data/avatars/m/30/30292.jpg?1626886300){kind=avatar}
