Reviewed: July 31, 2003
Reviewed by: Elias Fixler
Publisher
Bethesda Softworks
Developer
Akella
Released: June 24, 2003
Genre: Action/RPG
Players: 1
ESRB: Teen
8
8
7
6
8.0
Supported Features
Well mateys, they’re both about pirates, and they both take place in the Caribbean, but that’s where the similarity between the Xbox game Pirates Of The Caribbean (POTC) and the Disney movie of the same name ends. Both the game and the movie were pleasant surprises for me; I didn’t expect much from either, yet each provided a swashbuckling good time for as long as the voyage lasted. A pirate’s life for me...
Pirates is part RPG (Role Playing Game, as if you didn’t know), part action/adventure title. Developer Akella manages to blend the two genres into an “RPG Lite” that provides several different types of action gameplay.
As Captain Nathaniel Hawke of the Victory, a modest but quite versatile ship, you choose your own destiny. You can be a pirate in the truest sense, attacking ships and forts and plundering them with an insatiable lust for wealth. You can be a merchant, earning an honest living trading various goods among the Islands. You can be a “Ship for Hire” with or without regard for the nature of the duties you’re asked to perform. You can even choose to follow the game’s plotline seriously or at your leisure, or ignore it entirely, opting for the free wheeling (free sailing?) experience of life on the high seas.
If this open-ended style of gameplay bears more than a passing resemblance to Morrowind, it’s no coincidence. POTC publisher Bethesda was also responsible for that massive fantasy RPG, and there are many other similarities between the two titles as well.
Captain Hawke can build up his skills and abilities, RPG style, in a number of categories related to sailing, ship maintenance, naval and personal combat, leadership, and commerce. Because he can hire other officers to serve aboard ship and accompany him as a party on land, it’s best to specialize Hawk’s abilities in two or three related areas and hire officers with complementary skills. A jack-of-all-trades and master of none never makes for a good officer.
On land, gameplay is similar to that found in other action/RPG titles. From a third person, over the shoulder perspective, you guide Captain Hawke (and his party, if he has one) through various locations on the islands he visits. In towns he can visit local taverns to enlist crew and officers, shops where he can buy and sell trade goods and personal effects, and the shipyard where he can arrange for repairs to his ship, make upgrades, or buy a new one. Talking to townsfolk out on the streets yields interesting, sometimes useful, background information and fleshes out the microcosm that is the seventeenth century Caribbean. Do not, however, expect the level of background and intrigue found in Morrowind.
The wilderness outside the town walls provides ample opportunities to pick up experience through random encounters with highwaymen and other such ilk, while dungeonesque locations such as mines and caves wait to yield treasure to explorers willing to brave their depths.
Shipboard gameplay is like another game entirely. Though travel between islands takes place on a world map, events such as ship battles and storms drop you into a stunning third person perspective (there is an optional first person mode) where you control the action.
Your ship and your enemy’s have multiple health bars for ship, sail, and crew damage. Order your crew to load the cannon with grapeshot instead of cannonballs, to inflict crew casualties in preparation for boarding. Or, have them use knippel to rip your adversary’s sails and slow him down. Controlling and maneuvering your ship is not easy, and your success at surviving a storm or battle is dependent, as much on you own skill as it is on your Captain’s skill level.
The fact that Pirates is not based on the movie works to the game’s advantage. While Lord of The Rings based titles will forever be cursed with a certain degree of predictability, and complaints for either following the story too closely or straying too far from it (damned if you do, damned if you don’t), POTC suffers from none of these ills. The player is free to follow his own path with no preconceived notions.
Land based graphics are beautiful but uninspired. Character animations and architecture are both within the realm of expectations for today’s games. Day into night transitions are nicely done and make for some beautiful vistas at sunset.
Where POTC truly stands out is in the ship-based sequences. While the graphics aren’t really technologically superior, the sheer novelty of the scenery and the attention paid to key details such as the water rushing past the ship or the stormy skies creates an exhilarating effect. Ship to ship battles or even trying to outrun formidable adversaries become exhilarating experiences. For me, it was these that made Pirates worth playing.
You can thoroughly enjoy the views by panning the camera around your ship as she plies the seas, zooming in to watch your crew follow your orders to raise or lower the sails, load the cannon, or bring her around for battle.
Both the background music and the voice acting were adequate, though unremarkable. While the music fit in with the visuals it somehow seemed a bit off, not really of that time and place, and certainly not swashbuckling enough to get an aarrrggh out of me. The voice acting was a bit dry and repetitive.
Alas mateys, POTC at its best can’t withstand a long voyage. Although it promises longevity due to its open-ended nature, it is not complex or sophisticated enough to hold one’s attention as long as a Morrowind styled epic would. There aren’t that many skills to build, and the trade model is quite shallow. Building up wealth through trade is simply a matter of accessing a menu to see who’s importing and who’s exporting a particular item, then ferrying the goods. For those who follow the interesting, but far-short-of-epic story line to its conclusion there is no incentive whatsoever for replaying the game.
The ability to battle ship to ship against a human opponent would by itself have been worth the price of the game, but unfortunately that option does not exist.
There hasn’t been a good pirate-and-ship offering in a long time, so Pirates of the Caribbean fills a void. Despite its shortcomings, it’s a good game and a lot of fun.