Very pretty and pretty shallow (mini-review)
Akella, the company that developed Pirates of the Caribbean, released a new pirate game last month called Age of Pirates--Tales of the Caribbean It was published by a company called Playlogic.
The basic idea behind these types of games is to combine elements of RPG, FPS, RTS, action/adventure, and naval combat simulation into sort of an open ended Caribbean pirate version of Grand Theft Auto. It all goes back to Sid Meier's original DOS game Pirates.
Akella may have been the first to take this game concept into 3D with their first pirate game Seadogs released way back in 2000. It was graphically beautiful for the time and may have been only game to offer age of sail navel combat from a 1st person perspective.
Graphically, Akella's nautical games look good, but other than the first Seadogs, their other offerings have been mostly unfinished, unstable bug fests, and this latest one is no exception.
Your small starting ship--a lugger
Age of Pirates is plagued by lots of minor bugs, periodic CTD's and in my case memory leaks that cause pulsating frame rates after about 45 minutes of play. It's enough to make a simple pirate go "Arrrrgh" in frustration.
Akella has released one patch which reduced the crashes somewhat and fixed some sound issues, but it did nothing to correct the 100's of minor bugs that have been reported by players.
The bugs range from disappearing cargo to erratic collision physics. While most of them are not game stoppers, it really shows that the game was released way to early, and obviously had almost no final playtesting by either the developer or publisher. Both should be made to walk the plank!
There is a second patch about to be released, but no one seems to know what it might fix.
The sea battles are fun and challenging, and like Akella's previous releases, this is probably the most entertaining part of the game. Unlike PTOC, Age of Pirates includes online multiplayer for the ship battles. While I have not tried it, I understand the on-line battles are very fast, and the ships move around like speed boats rather than lumbering square riggers.
The ocean environment is really well done and one can almost get sea sick while walking the decks of a rolling ship. You can acquire and control a fleet of up to four ships, which can be upgraded with better sails, hulls, and types of cannons.
A frigate from the stern
You can pound your enemy into submission with either ball, chain shot, grape, or shells. Sinking an opponent will gain you experience points, but boarding or capturing them will gain gold, new personal weapons, and ships to use or sell for profit.
A huge line ship pounding a schooner into kindling
Sometimes a ship will surrender outright, and there is communications menu to demand surrender, but this appears to either be a random occurence or another bug since it appears to have nothing to do with the status of your ship versus your opponent. I have completely de-masted an opponent and pounded his ship to with in an inch of sinking, but they still would not surrender--other times I have had an enemy surrender after i simply fired a shot across his bow.
Boarding a ship results in two melee fights. One on the main deck with you and your crew against the crew of the enemy ship. It is pretty much a big confusing cluster of men hacking and slashing at each other and will generally be decided by who has more men.
Start of a Boarding fight--and yes one of the two characters you can play as is a babe dressed as a fantasy pirate hooker
If you win the boarding fight, you will then go mano a mano (or in this case, mano a fantasy hooker) with the captain of the ship in his cabin. The sword fighting controls are unresponsive and clumsy at best, and your most likely chance to win is by upgrading your sword and pistol fighting skill points. The developer could really learn a lesson by studying the light saber fighting moves that are in the Jedi Knight games.
This time around Akella actually included some real islands of the West Indies, but only a few, leaving Cuba, the Gulf coast and the entire Spanish Main out of the game. They did include the colonial powers of era: the English, the Spanish, the French, and the Dutch, but other that their flag colors there isn't much distinction between them.
Unfortunately, on land the game is pretty lackluster, and unlike PTOC, you cannot leave the towns and explore the islands.
AOP has these wonderfully large towns now, but about all you can do is walk around and gawk. There are no jungles, caves, banks, bordellos, odd buildings, or remote beaches to visit. They are there, you just can't access them. You can only enter the tavern, the store, the ship builder yard, and the governors mansion, which are basically the interfaces for hiring crew, trading goods, repairing or buying ships, and getting missions.
Towns filled with buildings and people that you can mostly only look at--the hooker pirate babe isn't bad to look at either. The guy on the right is named Scotty and is applying for a job in the engine room--ha, ha.
The ability to visit other buildings and areas of the islands are actually in the game code, but it is simply not implemented or turned on. This is another sign that the development of the game was cut short.
The story line is almost non-existent, and the missions, which are randomly generated, are simple "go there and a come back" affairs that get boringly repetitive after a while.
Game effects and ambient sounds are adequate, but nothing to really shiver one's tmbers. The music tracks are also less than memorable and would probably not qualify as good elevator music. What little voice acting there is for the NPC's is pretty sub-par. In fact it's kind of irriating that quite a few actually sound like a whiney David Schwimmer. I had just as soon hear fingernails scratching a chalkboard.
The one bright hope is that in the past Akella's pirate games have been easily moddable, and fans have been able to fix most of the problems and turn the games into what they should have been in the first place.
From what I have read, this one is going to be harder because it comes with that draconian Starforce protection system, which in this game retains a lot of the EXE files on the disk.
Still, I have managed to get about 10 evenings of fun game play out of it, and the game was only $30, so I am not totally disappointed. Besides I am a huge pirate and age of sail buff, so I am a bit bias towards these types of games.
I will probably set it aside now and re-visit it in a month or two after the Akella has given up patching it, and the mod fans have had a chance to correct all their mistakes.
The reviews so far have averaged about 65%, and as released for general consumption, that is exactly what I would give it.
If you are still interested, here is a link to the publishers site:
http://www.playlogicinternational.com/
Minimum game specs
CPU 1.8 Ghz--- recommended 2.5 GHz
RAM 256 mb--- recommended 1 GB
Drive---DVD-rom 6X or higher
Graphics---128MB hardware T & L compatable
System played on:
P4 3.2 GHz
1 GB RAM
Nvidia G6800OC 128MB DDR graphics
Creative Audigy 2ZS
Here are also some more random shots while at sea. If the game would let one take a shot without the interface, it could actually become a worthwile nautical picture generator.
Cheers
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Originally Posted by Proletariat
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