Od Studios -- Sid Meier's Pirates!
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Sid Meier's Pirates! -- by sector24, 2009-12-22 |
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Developer: Firaxis Games
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Genre: Hybrid (Action, Role Playing, Strategy)
Platform: PC, PSP, Xbox, Xbox 360
Publisher: 2K Games
Release Date: 11/22/2004
What is Sid Meier's Pirates!?
The 2004 remake of Pirates! is a modern version of the 1987 classic. It retains the features that made the game such a hit in the 80s and 90s while giving the game a graphical and technical overhaul. If you've never played Pirates! before, the game is essentially broken down into several mini-games that all mesh together to create a action/strategy/role playing hybrid game.
Sailing
The majority of your time will be spent sailing in the Caribbean as a privateer. You can sail faster with the wind than against it, and navigate to major ports owned by the colonial powers, minor settlements and pirate havens, or drop anchor and row ashore for some treasure hunting.
Ship Battles
You encounter other ships on a variety of missions from transporting (or smuggling) cargo, to pirate or colonial raiders intent on sacking enemy ports, to Spanish treasure ships heading back east with a belly full of plunder. You can initiate combat with these ships in which case you choose a flagship and enter a 1v1 contest. Some ships have escorts in which you have to fight 1v2, but an escort is a dead giveaway that there's something valuable in the cargo hold so it's worth the effort.
Ship battles have similar controls to sailing and you still need to use the wind to your advantage, but now you have cannons. You can choose between round shot, chain shot (designed to knock out enemy sails), and grape shot (designed to kill enemy crew). Every type of ship has unique sailing characteristics; smaller ships are highly maneuverable but can't carry a lot of guns or crew, while larger ships are generally slower to turn but can sometimes sink a ship with a single broadside. As the player you can choose any flagship that matches your playstyle. You can choose to use your cannons to pound the enemy into submission (if you reduce the enemy sails to 0% they automatically surrender), sink them, or board them and steal both their cargo and their ship.
Swordfighting
Swordfighting is probably the most common mini-game because every time you board an enemy ship you have to defeat the captain before the rest of the crew will surrender. This game is simple in scope, but requires good reflexes on the harder difficulties. You can choose a high attack, low attack or thrust, and for each attack you have an appropriate way to block. You can duck under high attacks, jump over low attacks, and parry thrusts. The game consists of you reading your opponent's moves and acting accordingly. Every successful hit moves the enemy one step backwards, and every time you are hit he moves one step forwards. The goal is to knock the captain off the ship by pushing him all the way to his side.
Dancing
It's not all swords and rum in Pirates!, you can also court and eventually marry a governor's daughter if you choose. A good dancer receives fine gifts and vital information for their troubles. The mini-game consists of your dance partner giving you hand signals which indicate the next dance move, and you have to press the right button in time or you stumble. It's all very dance dance revolution, and is probably the most difficult game to get the hang of, but it turns out to be pretty fun once you get the basics down.
Land Exploration
It wouldn't be a pirate game without buried treasure, and when you collect enough pieces of a treasure map it's time to drop anchor and lose your sea legs. This game consists of you matching up landmarks on the map to the actual landmarks such as geysers, deserted cabins, and indian totem poles in order to find a buried treasure. On the easiest difficulty it's a piece of cake, but on the harder difficulties you can't see as far and need to rely on your spyglass to spot distant landmarks.
Land Battles
It is inevitable that a pirate will make a few enemies along the way, and when a port opens fire on you, there are two choices. You can sneak in at night and play a sneaking mini-game in which you have to avoid the guards, or you can duke it out in a turn based strategy game against the port's garrison. Your pirates will be divided into squads on a grid and you and the garrison take turns using the jungle as cover against enemy musket fire and maneuvering your melee units close enough to attack. There are a variety of enemy units from indian scouts to cavalry and a number of contributing factors such as unit morale, high ground, and terrain bonuses. This is definitely my favorite game but it has the slowest pace.
What does this game do well?
Pirates! is a great looking game, and is finally able to match visually what it inspires mentally. Even the greatest games of the 80s had serious graphical limitations and it's good to see a proper remake do it justice. The game is colorful and light hearted in an Errol Flynn kind of way. No one actually "dies" they just get thrown overboard or knocked unconscious, etc. The game is very well animated, from the fish and dolphins that swim alongside your ship to the hand gestures and flourishes while dancing. The game is permeated with small cutscenes that play flawlessly and there is never any clipping of body parts or swords. The graphics are really polished to a high standard.
Of course the graphics mean nothing without the gameplay, and Pirates! has always been a fascinating game that is more than the sum of its parts. The most interesting thing about it is the open ended nature of the game. Although you choose a colonial nation in the beginning, there is nothing stopping you from working for all four nations at any time. Wars between the English, Dutch, French, and Spanish break out frequently, and cease fires are just as common. You can take advantage of the situation as you see fit.
The most interesting part of the game that was not in the original is that you have a much greater role in shaping the destiny of the Caribbean. Most of the game's "events" are ship driven, meaning that in order for Spain and England to sign a peace treaty, the actual ship carrying the treaty must reach a Spanish port. As the player you can decide to sink that ship en route, thereby extending the war. The wealth of a port is also entirely under your control, as you can blockade it by sinking all ships trying to enter it, or you can sack it for personal gain and even grant ownership to another nation (unfortunately never for yourself though). You can even "farm" a port by allowing governors and immigrants to land there, sometimes even escorting them yourself, but sinking any troop transports. This creates a wealthy port with very light defenses that you can sack for lots of gold.
Pirates! has an uncanny addictiveness to it. As a series of mini-games it doesn't seem like it would be all that enthralling, but once you start playing it's very hard to put down. Instead of "one more turn" gameplay it's more like "one more port". There are often criminals hiding in the tavern waiting for you to bring them to justice, or the barmaid will clue you in to where a valuable ship is heading so you can intercept it. You might find a piece of a treasure map to the lost city from the governor's daughter or the barkeep might tell you the best place to sell the spices in your hold. You never leave a port without one or two more things to do in the next port, so the time just slips away while you're playing.
The game starts you off on apprentice difficulty as kind of a tutorial, but there are four more difficulty settings that completely change the way the game plays. On difficulties above apprentice you can choose which sword you prefer for dueling, all of the mini-games are harder, and not in a cheap way but legitimately challenging. For instance the dancing mini-game has new dance moves and completely new songs, in the ship combat your ship is slightly slower which means you have to be that much more proficient at using the wind and knowing your ship's strengths, you have to collect more pieces of a treasure map before you see the whole thing, etc. It feels like the other difficulty settings are completely new games rather than just adding 1000 hit points to everything and calling it hard. You can also choose to sail during different time periods in the 17th century. The early time periods feature an overwhelming Spanish dominance while the later periods have more ships, better defenses, and of course more gold to plunder.
What could this game have done better?
There's not much that this game gets wrong, just a couple things. First, the ship combat angle is a bit awkward. It's not uncommon for your ship to be at a 45 degree angle but your cannons to shoot at a 35 degree angle. The perspective seems a bit awkward, and there is some computer auto aiming involved so it's hard to tell exactly what doesn't work right here. But things are a bit off which is all the more obvious in lieu of the rest of the game being so well done.
Also, the game features way too much swordfighting. Capturing ships is one of the primary ways to generate income and to get the best price you don't want them damaged. But in addition to swordfighting on ships, every criminal you capture is a sword fight, any time you sack a port with less than 80 soldiers is a sword fight, and there are sporadic swordfights when courting governor's daughters and fighting key story characters. It's a bit too much. As I was playing I was wishing the ship grappling had its own mini-game like in Ancient Art of War at Sea or something where your pirates came into play. The obvious advantage of a large ship is more crew but that is not well leveraged in this game.
My only other complaint is that actual trading is probably the most time consuming and yet least profitable endeavor. Each port has a cap on how much gold it has at any given time and a serious trader with a full fleet can barely sell 25% of his cargo hold at any given port. It's so much easier to just sell all your ships but the flagship and be a pirate. But then again I guess that's why the game is called Pirates! and not Merchants!
Should I buy this game?
Pirates! is a great game that has stood the test of time. As a testament to its success, a version of the game was released for a different system every year from 1987 to 1991, Pirates! Gold was released in 1993, and the modern version has been released at least 6 times on multiple platforms from 2004 to 2008. It's still one of the best games on the market, and has a timeless quality that defies the hardware it is played on. I would not be surprised to see Pirates! last another 20 years in some form or another.
Leave the author a comment:
Nathan -- 2010-01-11
I remember renting Pirates for the NES on a whim when it first came out. It was one of the best games I've ever played. I was definately excited to pick the new version up.
Weird thing though, I patched it right after installation and apparently they changed publishers. I had never seen that before. It was odd, I ran the game once and it had one major company logo but after the patch it had another. |
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