Sid Meier's Pirates! Review

Strategy is Key

All of these different gameplay types meld together to form a really enjoyable and complex overall experience even though the gameplay itself is pretty simple. There are a lot of governing factors that control everything you do, however, which gives the game a considerable amount of strategy. For starters, you are constantly winning and losing approval from the various factions in the game. If you make say, the English happy, you’ll get cheaper repairs and upgrades and their merchants will be more willing to trade with you and you’ll have an easier time recruiting in English ports. If you anger a faction, they won’t let you in their ports and will send pirate hunter ships after you. Another strategic factor in the game is that you have to keep your crew fed and happy. Feeding them is easy enough since you can acquire supplies all over the place, but the only way to keep them happy is to divide up the money, at which point they leave and you have to recruit all over again.

Another major component of the game is that your character is growing older every second that you play. When you first start out, you are very fast and strong and winning swordfights is easy. As you get older, however, it becomes much more difficult to win fights because you are older and slower. At this point, though, you have enough fame and pull with recruits that you can build a very powerful fleet and win battles with your cannons rather than with your sword.

All of these things factor into every decision you make in the game. Attacking the wrong ship can cost you a key port, but that same ship might hold enough treasure that you can buy a ruby ring for the governor of Montserrat’s daughter so she’ll marry you. You also have to be pretty choosy about who you attack because some of the other pirates out there are better strategists and swordfighters that you’ll ever be and if you lose you’ll lose your best ship as well as your money and supplies.

Eventually, you’ll have to retire from pirating. You’ll get a rundown of your accomplishments and then you can immediately jump into a new game and do everything over again. Good times.

Graphics and Sound

Visually, Pirates! is a very nice looking game, but it doesn’t go out of its way to wow you. You view the ships from pretty far out and they look good without being too detailed. Character models during swordfights or visits to the tavern aren’t spectacular, but they don’t really have to be since you don’t see them that much. You spend your time out on the ocean and there are some nice reflections on the water and nice effects such as sails moving around in the wind.

The sound in Pirates! is pretty impressive. The soundtrack is very good and features a nice mix of epic, old-timey marches, sea shanties, and themes from each of the represented countries. The characters don’t speak English and instead babble like Sims, but you’ll hear the pirates say “aargh” about a thousand times throughout the game which I still find hilarious even after playing through the game three times. Effects for clashing swords and the crack of cannons firing round out the audio and sound very good.

Bottom Line

Sid Meier’s Pirates! is one of the most fun and addicting games that I have played in a long time. I never though that being a pirate would be this fun, but Pirates! gives you a ton of things to do and a lot of ways to do them so you always have something interesting to do. The best part is that you don’t even have to take any of the missions or do anything at all to progress any storylines in order to have fun. You can only play for a few hours before your character has to retire, but the game is so fun that you’ll jump right back into a new game right away so you can try the things you didn’t do before or play the game an entirely different way (a peaceful merchant rather than a pirate, for example). This game is just so amazingly awesome that I think every Xbox owner should experience. It mixes so many different gameplay types and ties everything together with some nice strategic elements that it really does have something for everyone. I highly recommend Pirates! for at least a rental, but since you can play through it a dozen times and never do the same things twice, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth if you slap down the green to buy it.