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Pirates of the Caribbean Review July 24, 2003 Jakub Wojnarowicz |
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Summary: Avast me hearties! There's a flag on the horizon and it's a lone, weak ship. Why, it's Pirates of the Caribbean, the most confused game on the seven seas! It hasn't been a good week for Jakub, so maybe this theraputic bashing will help? Or did he have high hopes for the son of Sea Dogs, and is now crushed beyond repair?
 Overview | Page:: ( 1 / 6 ) |
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.
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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.
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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).
SIDEBAR: I’m extremely disappointed with Pirates of the Caribbean. I expected so much more from Akella and Bethesda, after the surprisingly good Sea Dogs.
| Graphics & Sound | Page:: ( 2 / 6 ) |
Graphics
Akella’s Storm engine is producing some of the nicest images we’ve seen. A common use of pixel shaders is to enhance water by giving it ‘waves’ and the requisite reflections. Most games benefit only marginally from this, but since Pirates of the Caribbean has the player spending considerable amounts of time on the sea, the effect is quite dramatic.
The Storm engine is quite flexible, as it is responsible for seaborne and land graphics, rendering ships and individuals with equal ease. Texturing is of the highest quality and the terrain is covered in patches of high grass that react to the player’s movement, but Storm isn’t quite a next-generation engine like Doom III or Half-Life 2.
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Unfortunately, Pirates of the Caribbean doesn’t take full advantage of the strengths of its engine. Too much time is spent on land or on the world map, rather than at sea. There also remains the size disparity between ships and land that irritated us with Sea Dogs. Ships are, relatively speaking, huge compared to forts and even cities. A frigate, never mind a battleship or man o’ war, will dwarf a settlement.
The developers did an excellent job of simulating weather conditions and the various times of the day. The sun moves from horizon to horizon, can be obscured by a fog or cloud, and storms wrack the ship mercilessly with high waves and strong winds.
Sound
The sound is merely adequate for the job. Would it really be so much to expect cannons to fire with a resounding boom, or the explosions of bombs to tear into the silence like a thunderclap?
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The music is blatantly recycled from Sea Dogs. While it wasn’t all that bad for a dark horse budget title from a Russian developer, we were hoping that with PotC being a movie-licensed sequel and all, it would receive an overhaul in this department. Not that we particularly want that tired, stock Jerry Bruckheimer music from the movie, but at this point even that would be an improvement.
SIDEBAR: Pirates of the Caribbean is a great, great movie. Johnny Depp is truly amazing as Jack Sparrow. So amazing, I named my ship after him.
| Gameplay | Page:: ( 3 / 6 ) |
Piratey stuff
The core strengths of Sea Dogs remain evident in Pirates of the Caribbean. Ship combat is quite exciting and has enough realism to make for a satisfying experience, but doesn’t emphasize the nitty-gritty of sail combat so much as to bog the game down with meaningless detail. The excellent skill system from Sea Dogs has been updated with Diablo II-like abilities that make life a lot easier for the aspiring swashbucklers out there.
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Unfortunately, as we mentioned earlier, the console focus of the title is all too evident. Pirates doesn’t just have a bad interface, or a console interface, it has a bad console interface. The mouse is nigh-on useless and the keyboard controls are nowhere near as friendly as a gamepad. Even if we did play this on Xbox, there are so many design issues with the interface that it’s almost impossible to know where to begin. The player’s inventory becomes too full, the character still can’t strafe side-to-side on land, aiming the pistol is hardly intuitive and the world map is a disaster.
Port Royale (more of a hands-on economic sim than pirate game) does everything but combat and graphics better than Pirates. Even though Port Royale gets bogged down with the tedious business aspects relatively early on, the dynamic economy, real setting and living world really shame Pirates of the Caribbean.
Bad bad bad
There is absolutely no reason for the pathetically small, characterless fantasy ‘archipelago’ that Akella constructed in place of the real Caribbean. Oh yes, it may be that designing 100 3D cities and islands would be too much, but nobody cares. The on-land aspects of the game are a chore to be dispensed with, rather than a pleasant interlude. There’s no thrill in fighting the same band of brigands (or at night, undead pirates) every time you skip by the same part of the island. Even if the on-land aspect was entertaining, people are buying a pirate game here, not a bad Neverwinter Nights module.
Pirates starts off being absurdly difficult. You are given a pittance of gold which barely pays for the repairs of your ship, and just enough cargo to trade for another small load of cargo, and then running trade routes. Pirates are a constant and over-done problem, being more common than any single nationality it seems.
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The storyline, such as it is, may be decent but it’s not compelling. To make matters worse, the player is automatically thrust into the story, rather than choosing when it starts. The French are the only enemy the player starts off with and while it would be great if you could raid their cities, you can’t. Their forts are indestructible, because they’re the French and the Big Enemy in the plot.
Instead of simply fixing what was broken with Sea Dogs, Akella took on a slew of new features and implemented them in a half-assed way, so now players get to play a colossus of a half-done project, rather than a tightly-focused, kick-ass pirate sim.
SIDEBAR: I can’t wait to fire up Port Royale again. Just get a money cheat going so I can skip that economy stuff, and it’s all good.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 4 / 6 ) |
Pros
Graphics.
Well, the game looks great. The large, intricate ship models are textured with care, and then placed on a beautiful, if not perfect pixel-shaded ocean, and then subjected to a variety of weather effects.
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Cons
Interface.
Possibly the worst interface since those ugly days when DOS games were ported to Windows 95. It doesn’t work on PC and we doubt we’d like it very much on the Xbox either.
Static world.
For all the attempts to make the world lively, the world map has shown what a dreadfully static place the archipelago is. AI ships float around randomly, making no attempt to even look like they’re even trying to run trade routes.
Confused focus.
Is it an adventure game? A pirate sim? An economic sim? An RPG? It’s got elements of all the above, but some of the elements don’t mesh very well.
Forced plot.
The player is given absolutely no chance to avoid the storyline, unlike Freelancer. French cities (all 2 of them) are indestructible. The other nations you can mess with, but that might screw up the plot.
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SIDEBAR: It’s damn easy taking screenshots of a beautiful game.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 5 / 6 ) |