Overview

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Review

Release Date: 06.24.2003
Platform: Xbox
Developer: Akella
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Inc.

Reviewed by Luke Campbell on 9.19.2003

Review Rating: 9/10

User Rating: 7/10

First things first: while this game is titled Pirates of the Carribean and is set in the same universe as the film of the same name, this game is not your average movie tie-in. PotC originally began its life as Sea Dogs II, the followup to Akella's first pirate game for the PC, Sea Dogs, but had its story and title altered late in its development. So if you're expecting some watered down movie-based game, don't. With or without the license attached to it, PotC is a solid adventure title.

Players assume the role of Nathaniel Hawk, a captain who is set to embark on a journey that... is essentially open-ended. Sure, if you go through the main story mode, you'll get a pseudo-prequel bit of story that links to the PotCfilm, but that's not where this game's strength lies. The catch to this game is that you can play it however you want.

If you want to be a peaceful merchant and run trading routes, that's an option. If you want to go through the game's storyline, that's another option. If you want to attack and pillage everything that moves, guess what? You can do that as well. It's all in what you decide to do, and how you decide to play. The game's manual even states that "you will be given the means to mold and shape your character as you see fit." This is easier said than done, and the sheer amount of options that are thrown at you initially can be overwhelming, so let's discuss the bells and whistles first.

Pirates is gorgeous. It's that simple. The environments look marvelous: town buildings are detailed inside and out, and upon entering a building, the load screen shows the interior of the building you're entering, which is a small but nice touch. The islands have swaying grass and cool-looking trees, and the caves twist and turn, giving the cavernous feel you'd expect to find. Characters look nice too, and are animated well. Townspeople roam around town, while the soldiers stay at their posts, bands of pirates roam in the jungles, while undead pirates dwell in the dungeon areas and look scary. The water needs to be pointed out as well, because it's immediately noticeable, as it is quite possibly the best looking water in a video game to date.

The ships in this game look absolutely spectacular. The sails raise and lower to whichever setting you choose, and the camera can be manipulated to zoom in on the ship's crew as they hustle about, tending to cannons or climbing the riggings to fix the sails, etc. If a ship takes damage, and believe me, your ship will, it's reflected in the visuals: shredded sails have visible holes, cannonballs leave gaping holes in the hull, and fires can eat your wooden deck up like it's nothing. Another terror to your ship, and another graphical wow-fest: the storms.

While sailing around, you'll sometimes find yourself stuck in a storm. The object of the storm is to earn earn experiences points from toughing the storm out. Drop the sails and try to maneuver with the flow of the water, and if you're lucky, you'll make it out of the storm in one piece. But the storms themselves are breathtaking. Tornados swirl, waves crash, and every so often, lightning strikes your ship, while the rain obscures your vision, but still lets you see how damned cool it all looks.

The music and sound effects in Pirates of the Caribbean do a great job of adding to the atmosphere. Towns have whimsical music that plays in the background, and you can overhear townspeople as they go about their daily business. Jungles have a sort of tribal beat, and majestic tunes accompany your vessel while you're at sea. Starting a fight (whether it's a pirate picking on you, or some citizen you chose to kill) will alert any nearby enemies, and the music shifts to a more serious and intimidating tone. The music is varied and long enough to avoid being repetitive, yet it's nothing you'll find yourself humming in the shower.

So we know it looks great and sounds good too, but how does it play? It's got a couple of flaws, but they're nothing that ruins the game. While on foot, Nathaniel can travel in and out of town, swim in shallow waters, or explore any of the islands. The left analog stick moves in any direction, while the right stick allows you to situate the camera to a higher or lower vantage point. Unless you unsheath your sword, you cannot attack, so it's not possible to accidentally kill someone, which helps to avoid any faux pas you might commit.

However, when you do whip your sword out, it's time to scrap. Swordplay is fairly simple, with an attack button, a parry button, and a backstep button. You can also bust out the trusty pistol and lay waste to people that way, but until your skills are built up, the pistol reloads slowly and is a last-ditch option. Swordfighting one enemy is easy, although it can get repetitive when you're trying to clear out a group of enemies and all you're doing is pressing attack, parry, attack over and over. Repetition turns to frustration when fighting multiple enemies, however; enemies will often gang up on your character from different directions, so even if you manage to kill one enemy, the other has hit you several times in your back or side. It leads to many cheap deaths early on, and may sour the more impatient players. But, as you build your character, you have the option to improve your finesse with the blade, and then you can put up a good fight against one or more enemies. It's not a perfect battle system, but it works well enough to keep the game fun.

Before you go around killing people, it's generally a good idea to speak with them, to see if they have any useful information. In a new town or unfamiliar area, a little direction to the nearest pub or shop is a great help. When you talk to a person, a dropdown menu will appear, and you have several reply choices to pick from. With townspeople the options are normally friendly ones, but with rival pirates or soldiers, you can choose to be a cocky smartass... which may or may not lead to a fight, depending on the situation. While this is not as spiffy as the speaking characters found in games like Knights of the Old Republic, it gets the job done, and some of the conversations are fairly humorous.

Talking to people is also the way that recruiting is done. It is possible to sign up crewmen from the nearest pub, but it is also feasible to speak with officers who will join your crew for a fee. These officers will follow you on foot and aid you in times of trouble, whether you're settling a score in town, or taking on a rival crew on the deck of their ship.

Taking to the seas not only allows you access to the other islands in the game, but opens up the option to partake in ship battles, or the aforementioned storms. Ship battles are terribly difficult at first. The game has an experience system that rewards a player for defeating a larger ship while commanding a smaller ship, but if you don't have the hang of naval combat, prepare to sink more than a few times before you're able to hold your own.

When engaging a ship in battle, the obvious plan would be to get your broadside facing the enemy's ship, and blast away with your cannons, but PotC gives you more options than that. First off, choosing your sail settings correctly can make or break a fight, as you can choose speed over handling or vice versa, and in either case, you need to watch out for enemy fire, as they are capable of shredding your sails in just a few rounds. But you're just as capable of laying waste to their ship as well.

On the attack end of naval battle, you can use several types of ammunition. Grapes are small metal pellets that are used to rip holes in the sails, but trusty cannonballs can be used to inflict damage, as well as bombs, which are expensive but do the most damage. Also, if your crew is doing a shoddy job of blowing the enemy to bit, you can swap to a first-person view and aim the cannons manually. This is a cool touch because you don't just aim straight and shoot, you have to take into account for the cannon's angle and the distance that the shot will fire in order to connect successfully. Again, the developers show how open-ended they wanted this game to be, as you can destroy ships however you choose, or you can opt to take them over.

By aligning your ship with an enemy vessel, you can board it, and duke it out with hand combat for control of the ship. This is yet another area where inexperience will get you killed, so it's good to have an officer by your side to help with the ass beating. Capture a ship, and you can appoint a captain to it, sell it off, use it for trading, plunder it... whatever you want to do, you can do it.

All of this "do anything" type of play is great, but you're not going anywhere in the game unless you level up. Leveling up can be done by completing tasks from your quest log, but this basically consists of running through the story mode. So if you're not up to that and you want to level up, you need to trade, fight, fight, and fight. Winning swordfights, surviving storms and completing other various odd jobs will allow you to level up without visiting the storyline at all, and all of the experience earned will give you skill points.

Skill points can be used to boost any of your ten attributes, which range from leadership and melee combat to commerce and luck. Enhancing all of them is probably advisable, but if you want to be a smooth talker who can't fight a lick, that's also possible. Ability points are also earned, and upping abilities improves your defense, offense, the ability to connect with critical hits, as well as improving your crew's ability to reload the guns or repair the ship faster, etc.

With a game that's got so much to see and do, it would be easy to overlook any problems, but there are a few glitches present, and they should be noted. The first two are technical problems. First up is the fact that the game needs to cache onto the system's hard drive. Until it does (which takes about 30 minutes), the game has noticeable lag. Once it's done caching, it runs fine, but this was a common complaint upon the game's release. Another problem is random save file glitch that causes the saved data to corrupt, causing the save in question to be lost. While this bug was not encountered while playing PotC for this review, it is a problem reported by more than a handful of players. The solution? Keep more than one save file, and save often.

Aside from the two technical problems, the only real issues are with the mismatched odds in swordfights that can lead to cheap deaths, and the super-steep learning curve. An impatient player will be turned off almost immediately, but for those looking to immerse themselves in a cool game world that's almost infinitely explorable, this game is a good choice.

Pirate of the Carribean was my pick for E3 2003 Game of Show, and I stand by my choice. The build we saw then looked great, and while the game is initially more difficult than I had anticipated, the folks at Bethesda came through on every promise they made about this game. If you're a big pirate buff or you like the kind of open-ended play offered by Bethesda's Morrowind titles, pick this one up and give it a try. If you're easily turned off by a steep learning curve, you might want to look elsewhere, but you won't know what you're missing. The inner pirate within all of you commands you to at least rent it, if not buy it outright.

Box art