Overview

Not so Caribbean

The first thing to know about Pirates of the Caribbean (for the PC), is that while it has pirates, it lacks a Caribbean and it’s for the Xbox, not the PC. But boy, does it ever have pirates galore!

In reality, PotC is really just Sea Dogs II, rebadged and marketed as Pirates of the Caribbean to tie in with that most excellent action movie. Of course, there are certain drawbacks to movie licenses. First and foremost, the game should be out in the same timeframe as the movie. Secondly, it helps if the game is based on the movie in some fashion. Pirates of the Caribbean clearly suffers from a shortened development and it has absolutely nothing to do with the swaying, stumbling, mumbling and occasionally swashbuckling Jack Sparrow.

Can't even use the keyboard to name my ship

It's time to strut

Mansions galore

Pirates’ most obvious shortcoming is that it’s the sequel to a PC game, made for the Xbox, but it got stuck halfway on its return trip to the PC. Sea Dogs was clearly a PC game that worked great on the PC. Pirates of the Caribbean has been simplified somewhat, and its interface butchered, bludgeoned and generally beaten down into submission to work with a console. It works, but I’d rather not play it even on the Xbox. On the PC, it’s a disaster. From giant icons that cover half the screen, through dialog boxes that have to be navigated by keyboard, to a hopelessly bright, cutesy and Disneyfied Final Fantasy-like world map – there is no redeeming quality to the interface.

Problems revealed

PotC, like Sea Dogs and unlike Port Royale, had a fake dynamic economy. Prices change but they don’t have any relation to the number of goods that were being traded. Indeed, the only actual trade going on is from the player’s ship. All the other ships out on the open sea just spawn in the middle of nowhere and go around in random patterns. Sea Dogs may have had a similar system, but the difference was that it worked. Not being able to see the pointless circling other ships on the world map lent an air of believability that the whole system worked. PotC’s world map ships are a rude slap in the face to anyone trying to believe there’s an actual economy in the game.

Aye guvnah

My beautiful Xebec

So purrty

Worse than the common ships, are pirates. Like other ships they appear randomly, but these pursue the player relentlessly. It matters not if the player is sailing a squadron of 4 frigates into a friendly, fortified harbor and the pirate is a lone sloop – he’ll come after you. He’ll fight for the 30 seconds that he lives, inflicting an irritating bit of damage, and waste a minute of your life because the AI is too stupid to know that a 16 gun ship stands no chance against 4 ships of 70 guns each (and a fort).