In Sid Meier’s Pirates! You’ll become take the leading role of a Pirate Captain in the 17th century Caribbean. Amass fortune and fame in an attempt to seize your rightful place as one of the most revered (and feared!) pirates in history. Enhance the gaming with downloadable flags, sail emblems, character skins and more
- The 1987 cross-genre classic returns with an all-new story, a new engine, updated gameplay, and 3-D graphics
- Play as a pirate captain cruising the 17th century Caribbean
- Confront enemies on board ships, in seedy taverns, and in other locations; use anything within your reach as a weapon
- Engage in fierce naval battles fighting single enemies or multiple ships
- For 1 player
List Price: $ 49.99
Price: $ 5.46
Pirates! Just like old times.,
If you have played any of the previous Pirates! games of the past, you will immediately recognize this game. The gameplay is essentially the same, with some added extras. The ship to ship battles play just like it did 15 years ago – and this is mostly a good thing.
Pros:
- Excellent graphics. The water animation is great looking.
- Varied tasks such as attacking ships and towns, finding treasure, finding lost family, keep you very busy.
- Easy gameplay. You can get into the game fairly quickly.
- Different “missions” keep you wanting to play more and more and watch your character progress.
Cons:
- Repetetive gameplay and animations/cutscenes. Everything in the game becomes tiresome when you have seen the same thing 20 times. There are only a few animations for each task in the game. Every town looks exactly the same also. There is no variety in the taverns, except for the colour of the hair of the “woman” at the bar. When swordfighting, there are pretty much 3 backgrounds that they take place. It is way too scripted also.
- No way to speed up sailing against the wind. Out of all of the things to make more realistic, they should not have picked this one.
- Sneaking into town is extremely boring, time consuming, and unvaried. There are two speeds to this – slow and slower.
- Even if you sail under one nation’s flag, you can still earn promotions from other countries. The difference between being a pirate and privateer is practically zero.
- Limited upgrades to ships. While the game boasts upward of 20 ships, you can only add about 7 upgrades (sails, armour, etc). Unique/special upgrades would have been a nice touch.
Overall, it’s a fun game and will keep you busy for many, many hours. However, you will become bored with it’s repetetion too quickly. There just isn’t enough variety in the game. Sailing and attacking ships is the best part of the game, and after a while, you will cringe at having to go into town for the 1000000th time to talk to the governor / dance with the daughter / fix your ship / trade goods. It’s EXACTLY the same in every town, and that is my biggest gripe.
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|Fun with a few pros and cons,
I never played the original though I watched my friend play it ad nauseum when we were kids, so thought I’d try this one out.
Pros: Easy to learn and fun, barely glanced at the manual and was on my way.
Ship battles are neat and upgrading your ship/fleet and getting more sailors is fun.
Sword fighting is fun, and at higher difficulties you have to do more than just do a low attack followed by a high to win.
Graphics are excellent and both the ship feel and the character feel is great.
Battles on land are pretty fun, and there’s a bit of strategy to finding cover and moving your units the right places.
Quests are fun, you look for missing family members, treasure and other pirates as well as deliver governors and villagers to new towns as an escort and you get promotions. If you attack the Spanish enough you won’t be allowed into most of their ports, so there is a price to pay for sinking all those richly laden merchant vessels
Buying special gear is fun at the tavern from the guy in the back.
Musical score is nice.
Cons: Wooing the governor’s daughter and protecting bar maids from nasty pirates is fun but dancing is a pain. Maybe there is some trick to it but even a piano player is hard pressed I think to keep up with the key strokes required to perfect dancing in this game
The towns do look the same and you have to go to them a lot to get food, repair your ship and get more sailors.
Keeping sailors happy seems quite hard though that’s probably realistic.
Sneaking into town I don’t even bother, I just attack if I have enough men.
Overall this is the kind of game like Civ3, though a bit less challenging, that you get bored of after a while but over the years keep revisiting once in a while and never quite uninstall from your computer
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|Did not live up to expetations.,
Being a huge fan of the orginal Pirates and other Sid Meier games, I was very exited about the potential for this new version. However, in the end it did not live up to my expectations of a challeging strategy game. This game is too easy, repeditive and really made for young children, not the typical Sid Meier Civilization types. After playing for a few hours I asked “Is this all the game offers?”
Similiar to the old Pirates, you are the captain of a pirate ship in the Carribean. Most of the game revolves around sailing to different ports, atacking other ships, and dancing with the governors daughters.
Sailing around is exceedingly boring and time consuming. Since the wind almost always blows in the same direction, it literally takes you 30 minutes to sail from one side to the other. Trading in the ports is virtually worthless… everything is based on fixed prices… it is a minor minor part of the game… when you can get thousands of gold from attacking pirates… do you really care if you make 50 gold by trading goods? No!
Attacking other ships is repeditive and easy. It starts where you sail your boat after their boat and fire cannons at each other. 90% of the time, their boat heads directly at your boat and then you duel. It makes it rare that you have a long drawn out cannon match. I thought the sword duels would be fun, they aren’t. Simply by constantly tapping the “jab” button you will win all the matches… No need to dodge, jump, etc… I have yet to lose in over 50 duels with this simple strategy… Also, it makes no sense when your boat with 40 sailors can easily take over an enemys with 200 or more all the time.
At the different ports… The governors daughter asks you to goto the dance… where you follow her dance moves around by pressing the keypad….. Then you do it over and over and over again…. It wasn’t fun the first time… its less fun the 50th time.
If people are looking for a much more complete and exciting pirates strategy game, I recommend Port Royale 2.
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