Sid Meier’s Pirates! Review

Captain Pugwash, Jack Sparrow, Captain Hook, Blackbeard, Dodgy Den that lives down the road. They are all pirates. 2K Games and Firaxis have released Sid Meier’s Pirates for the Xbox, meaning that you can join this illustrious group. Ok, perhaps Den should be carrying out some community service, but the others are all top dogs in their profession. Can Sid Meier’s Pirates join this illustrious group or will it be made to walk the plank?

Pirates is actually a port of last year’s PC game of the same name, which was actually a modernisation of a classic game from the late ’80s. Seeing as the majority of Xbox owners are unlikely to have played either we’ll take a look at the game in its own right. However, even if you’ve never played the original, it’s clear to see that the game is far simpler than the majority of games released today, an obvious sign of its heritage.

Pirates’ gameplay can be split into two distinct parts. The majority of your time will be spent on the ocean, traversing a large map (although, for anyone who’s interested, the physical size has been reduced over the PC map, but the actual number of locations hasn’t been reduced), visiting ports and taking on any ships that you feel will give you rewards within the game. While ship combat is simple, with ships battling in an enclosed area of water, choosing your foes is a more complex task.

These ports that you visit are occupied by the English, Spanish, French and Dutch. Throughout the game these nations will change their opinions on each other more often than the contestants in Big Brother, with war on the cards one minute, and peace the next. It’s up to you to take advantage of these conflicts. If you wish to please the English, find out whom they are at war with and sink ships from that nation. You’ll often find that some nations have a common enemy, so in these cases you can please more people with your actions. When visiting the governor of each port, if you have conducted yourself in a pleasing way to the nation, you will be rewarded, often giving you improved rank with the nation. Your rank (be it Colonel, Admiral etc) determines how expensive goods are at ports, how cheap ship repairs and upgrades are and how interested the governor’s daughter will be in your courtship.

Of course, ports occupied by nations who you haven’t treated well will punish you, making their goods expensive or off-limits and the governor’s daughter will be totally disinterested in your attention. While you could just ignore these ports for a while, until you’ve got into their good books again, it isn’t always that simple. You and your crew will require food for the many months that you are away at sea and this supply of food runs out pretty quickly, particularly when you have over one hundred men in your crew. The obvious solution to lack of food is to dock at a nearby port and visit the merchant. When the only nearby ports are occupied by nations who refuse to deal with you, you are left with quite a problem. Your men are starving and getting very unhappy, so something must be done.

The only real option is to engage in more battles, taking your enemy’s food and gold, in the hope that the food gained, and your damaged ship will make it to the nearest friendly port. Unhappy men will mutiny and leave the crew, so careful food management is essential. The more men you have the faster your weapons can be fired, but too many men will drain food too quickly. It is details like this that make the game far more demanding to play than it initially seems. You can also gain skilled crewmen from other ships, along with goods and gold. These special crewmen will improve your ship’s sailing speed, keep morale high, preserve food for longer and help improve other aspects of your journeys.

What you do in the game is largely up to you. There is an underlying plot surrounding your lost family, but these quests only make up a part of what is available. You can get new quests from port governors, governors’ daughters, mysterious men in taverns, and more. Of course, you could just play the game as a trader, going from port to port and making profit from your goods. It’s up to you. The game keeps track of your performance as a pirate and shows how well you are doing in comparison to other pirates (either locally, or globally via Xbox Live Leader boards). There is also a large achievements list that carries over from one game to the next. This gives you a good idea of what you are yet to complete within the game and makes repeated plays through your career even more worthwhile.

While the majority of the action is at sea, in ship vs. ship battles, there are a number of mini-games that pop up fairly frequently. The most common is the dancing game that you must play in order to win the affection of the governors’ daughters. These are simple ‘Simon says’ games, where you must press the button that matches the on-screen prompt. They aren’t all that challenging (especially on the game’s easy difficulty), but make for a nice break from adventuring. Duels also occur quite regularly, either against captains of attacked ships or wanted pirates. No matter the location, these fights always pan out the same way. You must time your attacks to catch your opponent off guard, and evade or parry his advances. You’ll get the chance to acquire various pieces of equipment throughout the game and these can be anything from a new sword to improve attack speed, to dancing slippers that make the on-screen commands easier to hit.

As you progress in your career, more and ports will become hostile. To enter these ports you must sneak around the streets, avoiding detection from the town’s guards. This becomes a pretty hard task on the harder difficulty settings, but you can use a few moves to get you out of tight spots. Your ability to take out guards from behind, scale walls and hide behind bales of hay all come in very handy. It’s worth pointing out that the Xbox version differs from the PC version here. The PC version viewed the action from an overhead view, but the Xbox version makes you play using a third-person over-the-shoulder view. This not only makes it more challenging, but also far more intense to play as you can’t see as much of the surrounding area.

The final gameplay type sees you battle it out in a turn-based game. When you raid an enemy port you must take on the enemy using your officers, sailors and buccaneers. You must move your units around the map in order to take advantage of the terrain and destroy or demoralise the enemy. If you win the battle you can take all of the town’s goods and change its allegiance to earn praise from a certain nation. While treasure hunting was another type of mini-game on the PC version, the Xbox version has simplified this somewhat. Rather than exploring an area manually, if you land near enough to some treasure, the game will automatically find it for you. Of course, you don’t know if there is treasure there until you look, and looking takes up time and food. It pays to know where to look, so finding treasure maps is vital if you want to go treasure hunting.

Something that is entirely new to this Xbox version is the four-player ship battle game. Essentially a faster paced version of the battles within the main game, you and three friends can battle it out on the same screen, pummelling each other with cannon fire. AI opponents can also play if you can’t get hold of enough mates, and with a small, but well designed number of maps available, this is quite an addictive little game. It isn’t enough to make the game worthwhile for existing PC owners, but when combined with the Xbox Live Leader boards and downloadable content (flags, sails etc) it makes a nice bonus for Xbox owners.

Despite being a port of a PC game that is almost a year old, Pirates on the Xbox looks remarkably good. The ships are all modelled excellently, with their sales glistening in the sun, weather effects pop up around the map and the sea itself has a wonderful Caribbean blue look to it. The only real negatives are the occasional stuttering as the game appears to stream in more data, and the slow frame rate in the dancing mini-game. These are minor problems that don’t have too much of an impact on the game as a whole. The audio is also brilliant, with a mixture of classic nautical themes and original tunes accompanying you on your journey. The characters in the game also speak in a Sims-like gibberish, which was probably a good choice given the large amount of text in the game.

Sid Meier’s Pirates is a simple looking game that is deceptively in depth and very addictive. While each pirate career will probably only last 5-10 hours, there are plenty of reasons to play through again and again. There isn’t really anything like this on the Xbox and anyone who fancies something a little different should jump aboard.