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Much like Sea Dogs, Age of Pirates lets you develop your character in a RPG-like fashion by collecting experience. At each promotion you are presented with points that you can spend on honing your skills or to buy a special ability. The skills include leadership, fencing, tactics, boarding, trading and etc. Each of these has their own effects on how you will handle these situations. Leadership will help you keep your crew in line, fencing allows you to dish out more damage in a fight, and boarding increases your chances to board enemy vessels during a sea battle. The special abilities or perks include more specific talents, such as "mentor" which gives your officers 10% of the experience that you yourself earn, and "windcatcher" will enable you to harvest faster speeds while out to sea. The ships are the most compelling aspect of the game, for they are the very tools that you will be using to make your fortune. You start the game with a small lugger, which is fast and maneuverable enough to please a beginning pirate or trader. Soon you will want to set your sites higher and commandeer a new ship! There are many choose from, eleven in total. Unfortunately, in the classic Akella fashion, some freedom of interpretation has been taken with the ship types and appearances. For example, a classic tiny boat called pinnacle is now the second largest ship in the entire game! At the same time, many juicy possibilities have been completely ignored, such as the brig-of-war and sloop-of-war. Both graphics and sounds have received a nice upgrade from the days of Sea Dogs. The new Storm engine really delivers with the fantastic water effects, storm effects, rainy days, night time and bright sunny days. Zooming up close to your ship's hull and just admiring the waves hitting the hull as you sail is a joy in itself. Unfortunately, the engine still professes some problems. For one, the sun doesn't seem to light up the ships much. You'd expect the side turned towards the sun to be brighter than the other side, but that's not the case. Also, you'd expect a modern game to provide the characters with some more polygons. The islands and the towns are very pretty, but whoever modeled them must never have visited the Caribbean, or seen pictures of the place. The buildings look more like something you might expect to see in Europe or Mediterranean rather than in the Caribbean. The Storm engine has its limits, the Caribbean in the game is not bordered by the American shores. In fact, in addition to being a bunch of islands in the middle of a vast and empty sea, the islands have been made smaller and fewer than they are in real life. Overall, the general sound is adequate. The voice actors perform well enough, although their dialog is a little repetitive and it gets to be a little tiresome after a while. Some of the more noticeable bugs surface here. For example when you use your telescope and pan around, half of the soundscape seems to suddenly go missing. To be honest there are quite a few bugs but none detract from the enjoyment of this game, I've had some CTD and I've noticed that sometimes your enemies just give up right in the middle of sea battles, furl up their sails and only shoot at ships that pass by. Ultimately these bugs never really spoil the game. So far the biggest bug is self inflicted, the inclusion of Starforce, shame on you Playlogic! Don't install the patch, remove SF, and get the mods ( SuperMod ), you'll be happy that you did!Read full review
Couldnt even play this game, what was nowhere in the game description is that this game ONLY works on windows xp. Any newer operatng system will NOT play this game, instead installs numerous bugs and caused my computer to crash after trying to install game. Tech support could not offer any kind of fix. Complete waste of money
Nothing more needs to be said. A very exiting, adventurous game. I like that you can pretty much do anything you want in the game. Endless possibilities.....
This game was like grand theft auto and it was sweet how you can do anything you want in this game, it is soo open ended and it really gives you so many possibilities.
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