by Maxis/Fraxis… is there nothing you won’t simulate? Are you not even limited by…
Okay, Civilization/Alpha Centauri games notwithstanding, Sid Meier’s other titles have been pretty… lackluster. True you could spend your day running over cows in Sim Farm, but Ace Patrol was overtly simplistic and strategically unfulfilling, Railroads! was a lesson in making a completely unbearable concept even more unbearable, and Colonization was training on how to be the world’s biggest racist prick. Without surprise, I had very little confidence going into Pirates!.
Pirates! isn’t great but it’s actually not that bad. It carries all of the mind-numbing childish simplicity that many of the other Sid Meier spin-off games have had (astutely, Ace Patrol) but there are two key differences that not only make this bearable in Pirates! but also make it borderline fun. A. The simplicity lends itself to important game mechanics, concepts and information that are very quickly and easily consumed and understood and B. The game gives you the freedom to use these mechanics in any way you choose, aka the game will let you fail. It might be difficult to fail, but hey, if you decided you wanted 189 tons of Sugar and only 1 ton of food, yeah you probably won’t make it that far, but hey, it was your choice to do so.
As the game is about pirates, you might have correctly guessed that there is a fair bit of, well, piracy. Gameplay follows a pretty straight-forward approach; pick a nation (Dutch, English, French and Spanish–I of course went with the Dutch again), pick up crew, rumors and quests at the tavern, pick up more information/quests at the governor’s, outfit your ship with supplies and equipment and then sail off. I suppose it would be possible to make the bulk of your money from trade but I mean… come on, who’s going to do that in a pirate game?
Tag a ship on the overworld to enter combat and let fight begin. Unfortunately, similar to Ace Patrol, while the combat looks good and flows smoothly, your strategical outlets seem limited to “click the button that does damage.” What’s worse is that within about 3 battles, I felt that I had “mastered” combat. The first combat, I sank the enemy ship to the bottom of the sea. This proved less than ideal though as the cargo sank to the bottom of the ocean along with most of the crew and ship. During my second fight, I softened the ship up, killing some of the crew and damaging the sails so that I could pull alongside it, board it and capture the ship resulting in a simplified but somewhat amusing swordfight. This resulted in more cargo and crew, but the ship was too damaged at that point to be useful. In my third battle, I simply rammed the broadside of the ship at top speed which resulted in an immediate surrender from the enemy ship, sparing the cargo and crew… but also for some reason letting me capture the ship with absolutely no damage done to it. If this is the complexity of the game’s battle mechanics, I can see little reason to do anything but ram ships all day, which would get boring quickly.
In spite of all these good things, I still almost put the game in Tier 3. It’s nice that all these features of the game exist and that you have the freedom to use them in the way that you want but… the game overall feels too easy or too simple to really promote growth within the player in any way. It seems like a game of grinding out money, ships and crew and ultimately just fighting things that are weaker than you over and over again. Er… well I guess I can’t complain too much. That does seem to be the pirate way of doing things. In the end, I forgave its simplicity and settled with Tier 2. There’s still enough good that on a day when you just feel like playing a game that’s going to let you win with little effort, this could be a fun way to achieve such an end. It’s sort of like a much easier less rewarding version of Mount and Blade but also much, much less frustrating, especially if you play exclusively as a woman in a man’s world and turn on the “no loading from older save files” option, essentially turning the game into a pseudo-roguelike. Pirates! probably ends with much of its fun on the same note that StarKnights does; get a big fleet and crush the enemy. Repeatedly.
