Prepare yourself for an essay the likes of which few pirates could read.
Fresh off my disastrous visit to Caribbean Tales, I decided to check out the legendary "sequel" to Sea Dogs I had vigorously ignored for 20 years due to Disney and skeletons. Overall, it's not *that* tampered with, other than the branding, in fact, the game makes reference to the Sea Dogs world a couple of times. But there were still some...strange...design choices.
First off, the main quest. It's...not bad, it keeps you busy for a good while. But the game wastes little breath explaining what the hell is going on. Presumably it all makes sense if you've seen the movie. Why is Danielle such a bitch? She hates you for wanting treasure. Then she wants treasure. Then she hates you. Then she likes you. You have a mysterious past where you're not sure if you're friends or enemies. She doesn't really seem to be a friend in this game. But she's just a part of the main quest. She is also immortal, which is both understandable but bad.
On the other hand, your other crew frankly drop like flies. There's not much you can do to help them. Just give them healing potions, train them (they all have skill sets like yours although seemingly 80% of the skills are only relevant to the player), and cross your fingers. I found myself taking my crew off the books before battles so they wouldn't get killed. Is that what I was supposed to be doing? How about they don't have to get into battle personally, and I don't have to play stupid games with the interface so I can have officers?
Most towns have a "dungeon" or "catacombs" filled with walking skeletons. They aren't impossible to fight if you have learned the system, but sometimes you just take damage from them when blocking. There is pretty much no explanation for their existence other than maybe the curse pertaining to the invincible sailors (which you only ever see once) somehow left legions of "killable" skeletons in tunnels for some reason. And there is not much reason to go rummaging around in there. Maybe some trivial loot, a little gold, a potion or two, maybe an ok sword. And for that you risk your life and run around in circles in the tunnels. And beware taking your crew down there, they will die like nothing and then their skills and quest (if any) die with them. The skeletons respawn if you re-enter the area, they are endemic, you see.
Most quests were straightforward, but I "finished" the game with several I could not solve for any reason. You get marooned at one point, and a guy promises his ship to you if you kill some random guy on another island. You then sail to that island to discover your whole crew and all of your belongings are intact and just waiting to set sail, forget if the ship itself is there too, I think it might be. So then to kill the guy - or at least find out what the deal with him is. Where is he????? I looked everywhere, asked every generic pedestrian, searched the town high and low. Is he in the jungle? I never did find out, or frankly why it even mattered to kill him besides the dubious moral imperative of fulfilling the quest to slay some guy. And that's about all we know about him, a name, and what island he is "from."
Or how about the missing children quest? Apparently after pursuing the clues, you're meant to pixel hunt the game to find some random priest in a church you otherwise have no reason to enter suddenly has a quest that helps you complete the missing children quest. And I would have been happy to do it. But the towns are too big for me to go asking every dude on every random island if he has something to say about a random quest. I wouldn't even know there was a church in some towns because you can't fast-travel there and there's no reason to go there unless a quest tells you to. There were no clues. So that was garbage IMO. Maybe the movie explains you go to a priest when you're searching for the black frigate?
The ships I did not like. Bit of an issue for a sailing game. The sailing was fine, "realistic" sailing is an option in this game unlike Sea Dogs, although to be honest I found it a little dull. It just took a long time to get anywhere. You can also fire from the bow now, which I am not sure if I like. Historical, maybe? But there was I guess a tactical element to not firing in that direction which has been removed. But there seemed to be fewer ship options to play with than in Sea Dogs. I only had one ship for almost the whole game. It was not great, a small ship, but I kept it because for some reason your starting ship is the fastest ship in the game. Helpful for not getting murdered at sea, but there are plenty of middling slow ass ships that would just get you killed if you "upgraded" to them. So I never did. I planned on buying a corvette, which I earned the money for by painstakingly escorting merchants back and forth to the settlements. But then the game decided to never offer me a corvette - seeing as the shipyard inventory is not always the same. And annoyingly the same ship type can have slightly different characteristics based on who builds it. I forget if Sea Dogs had that or not.
So, no corvette! Boring. Finally I bought a battleship. I finally found a corvette about that time, but there was little point in buying it if I could just get the battleship. And AFAIK the battleship is the one and only class 1 ship. Boring! I found the bills easy to cover with the battleship, due to increasingly lucrative merchant contracts that are only available to captains with larger holds. One guy paid me 40,000 gold just to sail a couple days away and talk to a shop owner. So I don't know if it was game breaking or what, but it more or less whittled the game down a lot to just going back and forth to islands while I repaired my ship.
And why repair the ship? Well, the constant storms are one reason. Usually you can avoid them, not always. They have a wide, wide footprint, but you are only forced "into" the storm if you get close to it, or make the mortal mistake of trying to land when a storm suddenly appears. You're not allowed to enter port in that case. If you aren't "in" the storm, you don't take horrendous damage from it. Pirates love to engage you in a storm though. Hope your ship is in perfect condition when that happens, pirates stupidly shooting at you while your ship tosses in circles (steering is more of a suggestion in the storms, probably better to roll up the sails unless you're trying to get away from the "twister"). Because in a storm, after you sit in it for while, you are given permission to leave (having "weathered" it). Unless you're "in a battle" with pirates. Then you can just sit in that storm until you're dead. They will die too, if you have more hull than they do and you hang around.
Other issue is just being attacked. In a battleship, pirates are just an annoying timewaster. In general I found naval battles became trivial at that point, although the sword fighting remained deadly (moreso because I reloaded to keep my fragile officers alive). When you become hostile to the English (due to quest), watch out. I sank more battleships than I could count. Not hard, but tedious. They can take a beating. And very dangerous if you let them hit you, which usually you could avoid entirely for some weird reason. The AI seemed more concerned with positioning or something than taking a shot. Would probably be lethal if I was in a slower ship.
Generally speaking I found no use for ranged cannons over power cannons. Just seemed to drag things out, and the AI never seemed to favor long range cannons to harass me trying to close.
Then the fort capture mission, which I bought the battleship for. First attempt, I quick sailed to the fort and got murdered (my ship wasn't even at 100% though). Next time I sailed the slow way, pretty much Sea Dogs tactics, expose yourself to as little fire as possible and take 'em out one by one. Was surprisingly easy, ship took maybe 5% damage. And that was with the short range (270 pace IIRC) 24lb cannons. The fort battle was harder. The crew all died and I had to do it all myself. At the last scene I had 4 soldiers attacking me simultaneously, which in Pirates of the Caribbean is no big deal. In fact, I can somehow block guys hitting me with a sword behind me and simultaneously in front. Well, I'm not complaining too much if they give me no crew to fight with. And I killed all four soldiers alone. Then you have to kill the town guards. Yawn. I get how "improved" this is from the abstract duels of Sea Dogs, but it's way more tedious to slog through. The rewards were 25K in gold and some junk. So basically nothing. I just went there to rescue the "inventor" from the dungeon there according to quest.
This "inventor" claimed he could provide amazing inventions in exchange for his rescue, although he failed to even describe one of them let alone incorporate anything useful onto my ship or inventory. I am sure he was important in the movie.
There seemed to be no other quest lines. Yeah, I know, there's a big mod that does everything, but I'm not really interested. I couldn't take quests from any governor except once, the French governor paid me a nothing to sink an English corvette with my battleship. And that seemingly was the end of that, I was English and therefore not eligible for employment in France even though I was somehow English but hostile to England. In Sea Dogs, there was a bit of this comical you-are-a-pirate-now-you're-not thing where a quest would have you "become a pirate" and then you might need to change clothes again for the next mission. In Pirates of the Caribbean, you seemingly are permanently English.
There are Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch colonies as well, though there's not much significance to that that I can tell. They're just other colonies with slight differences. I did think the modeling was beautiful overall. Each colony is built completely differently. The staircase at Conceicao was magnificent. And the colony at Isla Muelle (I hate that name) was magnificent. It really felt like a grand Spanish colony. But so what, it was just a scene to walk around in, there's nothing to do there besides the usual visit the shop or the governor once or twice, so although it is huge (a few colonies are), it honestly was just scenery.
The pirates also have a colony with no shipyard. It's...ok? It's not all that interesting. Neither is the smuggler fort. It's just some houses in the jungle and a random tavern (which is pointless except for the main quest which puts you there at one point).
The jungle is...big enough. Same jungle as used in Age of Pirates 2. It's true, the classic complaint about Sea Dogs: "it would have been a perfect game if you could go on land (and the bugs were fixed)." Well, here it is. Pistols, swordfighting, bandits. And...it's not that interesting in and of itself. There's lots of scenic but empty landing points on the islands. Some of them are used for smugglers, which I never really comprehended. Apparently if you try to smuggle, you are guaranteed to get caught. But first you have to wait for the soldiers to run from the other side of the island over to the beach the deal was made at. Then they ask you what you are doing. Presumably if you have high luck you might convince them it's nothing. Otherwise, you kill them. Then there's enemy ships off the coast which you discover when you go to sea in your heavily damaged ship. Presumably this makes you an enemy of the nation you smuggled to. Good deal? I don't know. It *is* possible to contact a smuggler overland, and also possible to enter a town hostile to you as long as you don't sail to it. But also a tedious pain in the ass. I guess it pays, but I never felt it was that good of an idea to go to war to smuggle some illicit fruit to Falaise de Fleur.
Going to the mysterious and undiscussed location of Khael Roa, my map was disabled, and according to the inventor (who is _not_ named Moses) is only accessible twice per year, and probably year round around the time the player frees him from Greenford prison. Because I just went there and it was open and guarded by some random petty pirate ships, and a Man O' War. The Man O' War was exciting and reminiscent of the thing with Beltrop, your only source of a slightly more usable Man O' War in Sea Dogs, and seemingly named after him as well. I decided to capture it and that wasn't difficult at all. Seemingly the evil English governor is captain, just because. Still couldn't leave. But could quick travel to the beach within the caldera, saving me the trouble of steering that massive ship through the shoals (no idea what the Sense Fairway is for, literally never saw a use for it).
I landed and cautiously went into the temple, which was needless, because as far as I can tell, the temple, which is renowned for its dangerous traps, has a grand total of one hazard (besides some skeletons). This is a portal switch thing that summons a few weak native skeletons, which I couldn't even fight because Danielle blocks the hallway and kills them all herself. Other than that it's a bunch of very long, empty corridors that were more confusing than anything else, if not dull. At the end of the journey is a pearl thing that loads scenes in the game. Now Danielle is ignoring the expert's advice to watch out for traps and grabbing the pearl thing from the monolithic statue of a dragon.
She grabs the pearl (or whatever it is, it is never identified in game and has no item description) and it turns out to be load bearing. The temple pretty much explodes and the party escaped in a cutscene somehow, who cares. Then another cutscene has the black pearl ship showing up. It's that item that they all want, right? The cursed one that keeps them undead or whatever? I don't even remember the details. Then we're at sea with my nearly dead prize vessel and my battleship, which seem to think the best course of action is to sail straight for the enemy ship. Winds are very high. They die. I reload because I don't yet know that this battle is terminal and there is literally no game left beyond it. This involves running through the temple like another 2.5 times. The Man O' War is sort of a prop for this one scene to make the fight a pushover. The pearl or whatever can be "activated" which as I understand it is meant to make the black pearl vulnerable, but I saw it taking damage before I did that.
I thought it was too interesting a scenario to pass up boarding the black pearl. You cannot board the black pearl. It will shoot you up and waste your time while you attempt to accomplish this. But its efforts against the Man O' War were so laughable, I elected to continue (again, assuming I was going to have to repair this ship) with the attack and not reload due to being screwed by the game on boarding mechanics. You sink the ship, the game ends. I was really hoping for some more clarity on what was going on. What about the treasure I didn't need? What about the English? What about serving some other nation? Take on some guys with my new Man O' War? NOPE. Game's over, son! I guess it would have seemed pathetically empty if it had continued past that point - speaking of Age of Pirates.
Music
Ho boy. Age of Pirates, the supermod has this music switcher thing. One option is Pirates of the Caribbean music. I don't know what the hell music that was, because this game does not have that music in it. Not that it matters too much. The music is all right. It's passable. It does have a slight Disney flavor, but it's more generic than Disney style. There's some truly bizarre music on land. One track sounds like 70s lounge music. Age of Pirates 2's music is repetitive, but it's decent. This is just...ugh.
So what's the big deal though? It's all right, the music isn't that bad. The big deal is Sea Dogs had glorious music, you know, the music very briefly sampled in the involuntary cutscene at Oxbay (that's the Spanish music, not the French music!). An orchestral score for an epic at sea. Now I'm not faulting Pirates of the Caribbean at all for not simply copying Sea Dogs' soundtrack. But the new one sucks hard. It's just a huge downgrade. All right, the tavern music is passable (the "Age of Pirates of the Caribbean" music had some nice Irish stuff in there). But that's about the best of it.
Controls
Terrible lack of options for assigning keys. Console style menus are cumbersome and slow. Separate keys for confirming things, opening the action menu, and interacting or something. I don't know. Like the later Akella stuff, the whole game code is open and I can hard code it the way I want. Pain in the ass to do it though. And it doesn't even break the game, it was just a little annoying, I had the same key for opening the menu and talking, so I had to look away from my companions to quick travel. Combat felt nice, no real complaints. The guns were fun I guess.
Stability
Ugh. So...
mostly it was perfect, but a few times, including right after coming back from reconnoitering Oxbay, the game absolutely refused to run the sea map. CTD. I had to load old saves multiple times. Then it worked other times for unknown reasons. Seemed quest related. Sometimes it seemed boundary related. Other times time related. Once I opened the map, (tried this many times) briefly moved the ship, saved, and quit to try to get the game to work. Seemed to work once. But later sea map CTDs happened more or less instantly, preventing me from moving and then saving. No idea why. After a certain point in the quests the game just never crashed. All I can say is, this is definitely one you save frequently.
This game never got a patch. I would say it is amazingly good for an unpatched Akella game.
Abilities
A lot of the skills seem pointless. Exactly how much of a boarding master do I need to be? Maybe just sail up to the other ships and put the points into some more critical stuff. Or trading skills? I guess it's all right, but for such a precious character resource, a little extra gold? Who wants that? Or the right to trade contraband at unprofitable prices. Nice.
There are some super broken sounding repair skills, like "repair 90% of your ship during battle with resources." Like I guess you could have some kind of patch up ability, but 90%, WTF? I decided not to pick them because of how gamey they felt. And frankly the sea combat skills were pretty overpowered too. It was fun to upgrade this 'n' that, but felt a little like some kind of separation from the main game's model of ships, technology, sailors and basic skills. Just click this button to fire your guns 20% further, yeah why not.
The sword fighting skills on the other hand, I could use all of that I could find. The critical hits got a little intense at the end of the game, but I could still be slain by a few skeletons quickly enough.
I feel like I've written some more about this game elsewhere and forgot what I was doing and what I wanted to say. But I guess I've talked to myself enough.
Overall, good game, but not great. The combat, sea and land is pretty good IMO, and the crew never gave me any trouble in this game. I paid them, they were cool, raised leadership, then they were elated. The towns are cool but not that fun. The jungle is...an addition...The story is MEH but the quests actually are entertaining, and that works for me. Mod probably goes hog wild on game potential. The game lacks an elegant simplicity of Sea Dogs, but improves on it in several significant ways.
Fresh off my disastrous visit to Caribbean Tales, I decided to check out the legendary "sequel" to Sea Dogs I had vigorously ignored for 20 years due to Disney and skeletons. Overall, it's not *that* tampered with, other than the branding, in fact, the game makes reference to the Sea Dogs world a couple of times. But there were still some...strange...design choices.
First off, the main quest. It's...not bad, it keeps you busy for a good while. But the game wastes little breath explaining what the hell is going on. Presumably it all makes sense if you've seen the movie. Why is Danielle such a bitch? She hates you for wanting treasure. Then she wants treasure. Then she hates you. Then she likes you. You have a mysterious past where you're not sure if you're friends or enemies. She doesn't really seem to be a friend in this game. But she's just a part of the main quest. She is also immortal, which is both understandable but bad.
On the other hand, your other crew frankly drop like flies. There's not much you can do to help them. Just give them healing potions, train them (they all have skill sets like yours although seemingly 80% of the skills are only relevant to the player), and cross your fingers. I found myself taking my crew off the books before battles so they wouldn't get killed. Is that what I was supposed to be doing? How about they don't have to get into battle personally, and I don't have to play stupid games with the interface so I can have officers?
Most towns have a "dungeon" or "catacombs" filled with walking skeletons. They aren't impossible to fight if you have learned the system, but sometimes you just take damage from them when blocking. There is pretty much no explanation for their existence other than maybe the curse pertaining to the invincible sailors (which you only ever see once) somehow left legions of "killable" skeletons in tunnels for some reason. And there is not much reason to go rummaging around in there. Maybe some trivial loot, a little gold, a potion or two, maybe an ok sword. And for that you risk your life and run around in circles in the tunnels. And beware taking your crew down there, they will die like nothing and then their skills and quest (if any) die with them. The skeletons respawn if you re-enter the area, they are endemic, you see.
Most quests were straightforward, but I "finished" the game with several I could not solve for any reason. You get marooned at one point, and a guy promises his ship to you if you kill some random guy on another island. You then sail to that island to discover your whole crew and all of your belongings are intact and just waiting to set sail, forget if the ship itself is there too, I think it might be. So then to kill the guy - or at least find out what the deal with him is. Where is he????? I looked everywhere, asked every generic pedestrian, searched the town high and low. Is he in the jungle? I never did find out, or frankly why it even mattered to kill him besides the dubious moral imperative of fulfilling the quest to slay some guy. And that's about all we know about him, a name, and what island he is "from."
Or how about the missing children quest? Apparently after pursuing the clues, you're meant to pixel hunt the game to find some random priest in a church you otherwise have no reason to enter suddenly has a quest that helps you complete the missing children quest. And I would have been happy to do it. But the towns are too big for me to go asking every dude on every random island if he has something to say about a random quest. I wouldn't even know there was a church in some towns because you can't fast-travel there and there's no reason to go there unless a quest tells you to. There were no clues. So that was garbage IMO. Maybe the movie explains you go to a priest when you're searching for the black frigate?
The ships I did not like. Bit of an issue for a sailing game. The sailing was fine, "realistic" sailing is an option in this game unlike Sea Dogs, although to be honest I found it a little dull. It just took a long time to get anywhere. You can also fire from the bow now, which I am not sure if I like. Historical, maybe? But there was I guess a tactical element to not firing in that direction which has been removed. But there seemed to be fewer ship options to play with than in Sea Dogs. I only had one ship for almost the whole game. It was not great, a small ship, but I kept it because for some reason your starting ship is the fastest ship in the game. Helpful for not getting murdered at sea, but there are plenty of middling slow ass ships that would just get you killed if you "upgraded" to them. So I never did. I planned on buying a corvette, which I earned the money for by painstakingly escorting merchants back and forth to the settlements. But then the game decided to never offer me a corvette - seeing as the shipyard inventory is not always the same. And annoyingly the same ship type can have slightly different characteristics based on who builds it. I forget if Sea Dogs had that or not.
So, no corvette! Boring. Finally I bought a battleship. I finally found a corvette about that time, but there was little point in buying it if I could just get the battleship. And AFAIK the battleship is the one and only class 1 ship. Boring! I found the bills easy to cover with the battleship, due to increasingly lucrative merchant contracts that are only available to captains with larger holds. One guy paid me 40,000 gold just to sail a couple days away and talk to a shop owner. So I don't know if it was game breaking or what, but it more or less whittled the game down a lot to just going back and forth to islands while I repaired my ship.
And why repair the ship? Well, the constant storms are one reason. Usually you can avoid them, not always. They have a wide, wide footprint, but you are only forced "into" the storm if you get close to it, or make the mortal mistake of trying to land when a storm suddenly appears. You're not allowed to enter port in that case. If you aren't "in" the storm, you don't take horrendous damage from it. Pirates love to engage you in a storm though. Hope your ship is in perfect condition when that happens, pirates stupidly shooting at you while your ship tosses in circles (steering is more of a suggestion in the storms, probably better to roll up the sails unless you're trying to get away from the "twister"). Because in a storm, after you sit in it for while, you are given permission to leave (having "weathered" it). Unless you're "in a battle" with pirates. Then you can just sit in that storm until you're dead. They will die too, if you have more hull than they do and you hang around.
Other issue is just being attacked. In a battleship, pirates are just an annoying timewaster. In general I found naval battles became trivial at that point, although the sword fighting remained deadly (moreso because I reloaded to keep my fragile officers alive). When you become hostile to the English (due to quest), watch out. I sank more battleships than I could count. Not hard, but tedious. They can take a beating. And very dangerous if you let them hit you, which usually you could avoid entirely for some weird reason. The AI seemed more concerned with positioning or something than taking a shot. Would probably be lethal if I was in a slower ship.
Generally speaking I found no use for ranged cannons over power cannons. Just seemed to drag things out, and the AI never seemed to favor long range cannons to harass me trying to close.
Then the fort capture mission, which I bought the battleship for. First attempt, I quick sailed to the fort and got murdered (my ship wasn't even at 100% though). Next time I sailed the slow way, pretty much Sea Dogs tactics, expose yourself to as little fire as possible and take 'em out one by one. Was surprisingly easy, ship took maybe 5% damage. And that was with the short range (270 pace IIRC) 24lb cannons. The fort battle was harder. The crew all died and I had to do it all myself. At the last scene I had 4 soldiers attacking me simultaneously, which in Pirates of the Caribbean is no big deal. In fact, I can somehow block guys hitting me with a sword behind me and simultaneously in front. Well, I'm not complaining too much if they give me no crew to fight with. And I killed all four soldiers alone. Then you have to kill the town guards. Yawn. I get how "improved" this is from the abstract duels of Sea Dogs, but it's way more tedious to slog through. The rewards were 25K in gold and some junk. So basically nothing. I just went there to rescue the "inventor" from the dungeon there according to quest.
This "inventor" claimed he could provide amazing inventions in exchange for his rescue, although he failed to even describe one of them let alone incorporate anything useful onto my ship or inventory. I am sure he was important in the movie.
There seemed to be no other quest lines. Yeah, I know, there's a big mod that does everything, but I'm not really interested. I couldn't take quests from any governor except once, the French governor paid me a nothing to sink an English corvette with my battleship. And that seemingly was the end of that, I was English and therefore not eligible for employment in France even though I was somehow English but hostile to England. In Sea Dogs, there was a bit of this comical you-are-a-pirate-now-you're-not thing where a quest would have you "become a pirate" and then you might need to change clothes again for the next mission. In Pirates of the Caribbean, you seemingly are permanently English.
There are Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch colonies as well, though there's not much significance to that that I can tell. They're just other colonies with slight differences. I did think the modeling was beautiful overall. Each colony is built completely differently. The staircase at Conceicao was magnificent. And the colony at Isla Muelle (I hate that name) was magnificent. It really felt like a grand Spanish colony. But so what, it was just a scene to walk around in, there's nothing to do there besides the usual visit the shop or the governor once or twice, so although it is huge (a few colonies are), it honestly was just scenery.
The pirates also have a colony with no shipyard. It's...ok? It's not all that interesting. Neither is the smuggler fort. It's just some houses in the jungle and a random tavern (which is pointless except for the main quest which puts you there at one point).
The jungle is...big enough. Same jungle as used in Age of Pirates 2. It's true, the classic complaint about Sea Dogs: "it would have been a perfect game if you could go on land (and the bugs were fixed)." Well, here it is. Pistols, swordfighting, bandits. And...it's not that interesting in and of itself. There's lots of scenic but empty landing points on the islands. Some of them are used for smugglers, which I never really comprehended. Apparently if you try to smuggle, you are guaranteed to get caught. But first you have to wait for the soldiers to run from the other side of the island over to the beach the deal was made at. Then they ask you what you are doing. Presumably if you have high luck you might convince them it's nothing. Otherwise, you kill them. Then there's enemy ships off the coast which you discover when you go to sea in your heavily damaged ship. Presumably this makes you an enemy of the nation you smuggled to. Good deal? I don't know. It *is* possible to contact a smuggler overland, and also possible to enter a town hostile to you as long as you don't sail to it. But also a tedious pain in the ass. I guess it pays, but I never felt it was that good of an idea to go to war to smuggle some illicit fruit to Falaise de Fleur.
Going to the mysterious and undiscussed location of Khael Roa, my map was disabled, and according to the inventor (who is _not_ named Moses) is only accessible twice per year, and probably year round around the time the player frees him from Greenford prison. Because I just went there and it was open and guarded by some random petty pirate ships, and a Man O' War. The Man O' War was exciting and reminiscent of the thing with Beltrop, your only source of a slightly more usable Man O' War in Sea Dogs, and seemingly named after him as well. I decided to capture it and that wasn't difficult at all. Seemingly the evil English governor is captain, just because. Still couldn't leave. But could quick travel to the beach within the caldera, saving me the trouble of steering that massive ship through the shoals (no idea what the Sense Fairway is for, literally never saw a use for it).
I landed and cautiously went into the temple, which was needless, because as far as I can tell, the temple, which is renowned for its dangerous traps, has a grand total of one hazard (besides some skeletons). This is a portal switch thing that summons a few weak native skeletons, which I couldn't even fight because Danielle blocks the hallway and kills them all herself. Other than that it's a bunch of very long, empty corridors that were more confusing than anything else, if not dull. At the end of the journey is a pearl thing that loads scenes in the game. Now Danielle is ignoring the expert's advice to watch out for traps and grabbing the pearl thing from the monolithic statue of a dragon.
She grabs the pearl (or whatever it is, it is never identified in game and has no item description) and it turns out to be load bearing. The temple pretty much explodes and the party escaped in a cutscene somehow, who cares. Then another cutscene has the black pearl ship showing up. It's that item that they all want, right? The cursed one that keeps them undead or whatever? I don't even remember the details. Then we're at sea with my nearly dead prize vessel and my battleship, which seem to think the best course of action is to sail straight for the enemy ship. Winds are very high. They die. I reload because I don't yet know that this battle is terminal and there is literally no game left beyond it. This involves running through the temple like another 2.5 times. The Man O' War is sort of a prop for this one scene to make the fight a pushover. The pearl or whatever can be "activated" which as I understand it is meant to make the black pearl vulnerable, but I saw it taking damage before I did that.
I thought it was too interesting a scenario to pass up boarding the black pearl. You cannot board the black pearl. It will shoot you up and waste your time while you attempt to accomplish this. But its efforts against the Man O' War were so laughable, I elected to continue (again, assuming I was going to have to repair this ship) with the attack and not reload due to being screwed by the game on boarding mechanics. You sink the ship, the game ends. I was really hoping for some more clarity on what was going on. What about the treasure I didn't need? What about the English? What about serving some other nation? Take on some guys with my new Man O' War? NOPE. Game's over, son! I guess it would have seemed pathetically empty if it had continued past that point - speaking of Age of Pirates.
Music
Ho boy. Age of Pirates, the supermod has this music switcher thing. One option is Pirates of the Caribbean music. I don't know what the hell music that was, because this game does not have that music in it. Not that it matters too much. The music is all right. It's passable. It does have a slight Disney flavor, but it's more generic than Disney style. There's some truly bizarre music on land. One track sounds like 70s lounge music. Age of Pirates 2's music is repetitive, but it's decent. This is just...ugh.
So what's the big deal though? It's all right, the music isn't that bad. The big deal is Sea Dogs had glorious music, you know, the music very briefly sampled in the involuntary cutscene at Oxbay (that's the Spanish music, not the French music!). An orchestral score for an epic at sea. Now I'm not faulting Pirates of the Caribbean at all for not simply copying Sea Dogs' soundtrack. But the new one sucks hard. It's just a huge downgrade. All right, the tavern music is passable (the "Age of Pirates of the Caribbean" music had some nice Irish stuff in there). But that's about the best of it.
Controls
Terrible lack of options for assigning keys. Console style menus are cumbersome and slow. Separate keys for confirming things, opening the action menu, and interacting or something. I don't know. Like the later Akella stuff, the whole game code is open and I can hard code it the way I want. Pain in the ass to do it though. And it doesn't even break the game, it was just a little annoying, I had the same key for opening the menu and talking, so I had to look away from my companions to quick travel. Combat felt nice, no real complaints. The guns were fun I guess.
Stability
Ugh. So...
mostly it was perfect, but a few times, including right after coming back from reconnoitering Oxbay, the game absolutely refused to run the sea map. CTD. I had to load old saves multiple times. Then it worked other times for unknown reasons. Seemed quest related. Sometimes it seemed boundary related. Other times time related. Once I opened the map, (tried this many times) briefly moved the ship, saved, and quit to try to get the game to work. Seemed to work once. But later sea map CTDs happened more or less instantly, preventing me from moving and then saving. No idea why. After a certain point in the quests the game just never crashed. All I can say is, this is definitely one you save frequently.
This game never got a patch. I would say it is amazingly good for an unpatched Akella game.
Abilities
A lot of the skills seem pointless. Exactly how much of a boarding master do I need to be? Maybe just sail up to the other ships and put the points into some more critical stuff. Or trading skills? I guess it's all right, but for such a precious character resource, a little extra gold? Who wants that? Or the right to trade contraband at unprofitable prices. Nice.
There are some super broken sounding repair skills, like "repair 90% of your ship during battle with resources." Like I guess you could have some kind of patch up ability, but 90%, WTF? I decided not to pick them because of how gamey they felt. And frankly the sea combat skills were pretty overpowered too. It was fun to upgrade this 'n' that, but felt a little like some kind of separation from the main game's model of ships, technology, sailors and basic skills. Just click this button to fire your guns 20% further, yeah why not.
The sword fighting skills on the other hand, I could use all of that I could find. The critical hits got a little intense at the end of the game, but I could still be slain by a few skeletons quickly enough.
I feel like I've written some more about this game elsewhere and forgot what I was doing and what I wanted to say. But I guess I've talked to myself enough.
Overall, good game, but not great. The combat, sea and land is pretty good IMO, and the crew never gave me any trouble in this game. I paid them, they were cool, raised leadership, then they were elated. The towns are cool but not that fun. The jungle is...an addition...The story is MEH but the quests actually are entertaining, and that works for me. Mod probably goes hog wild on game potential. The game lacks an elegant simplicity of Sea Dogs, but improves on it in several significant ways.
