Sid Meier’s Pirates!

I love this game, but I wish they had Sid Meiers Gold.

This game isn't perfect, but even after all of these years, it delivers a fun, challenging experience. The graphics are clearly dated, but the heavily stylized look actually serves it well, I think; it's not going to age nearly as poorly as something that makes more of an attempt at being "realistic-looking". The setting is beautifully realized and the sheer variety of things to do could easily overwhelm a new player, but the Apprentice mode that the game starts you in by default does a really good job of introducing the various mechanics of the game in an easily-digested way. The gameplay itself is fun and goes at a decent clip, though there IS a bit of a problem... the trade winds blow all year round, it seems, so trying to backtrack to the east once you've sailed west is invariably slow. Still, there are things that you can do to speed it up, and there's sure to be lots of adventures to have and plunder to take along the way. Overall, this is a very solid game, and probably the best single-player pirate-themed game that I have played to date. Especially considering how inexpensive it usually is, don't hesitate to grab it; it won't disappoint.

Runs fine on 11. Controls are... antiquated.. but not bad.. a good game..

Pirates! is a very enjoyable experience, up to the certain point. The game's mood is top notch and the gameplay loop is engaging. The simulation in the background is impressive. The game really gives you a great deal of freedom in choosing what to do and how to do it. You can be a real pirate, a corsair, side with one country, be neutral, or wage war against everyone. You can trade, discover lost cities and pirate treasures, romance governors' daughters, collect artifacts, and compete with other pirates. You need to regularly divide the plunder with your crew, which resets your resource accumulation a bit and shakes up the world simulation. However, the game quickly runs out of surprises, where it forces you to repeat the same small selection of minigames, which only increase in difficulty if you choose to advance pirate ranks between adventures, but doesn't introduce any new mechanics or even smoke and mirrors to what you've experienced in the first couple of hours. You just repeat the same stuff for increasingly less enticing rewards. The family story line is bare bones and boils down to chasing the same two (!) pirates throughout, until you discover their hideout and defeat the antagonist. It gives you some cash and a non-gameplay affecting crew member. Open world sailing quickly gets annoying and a time sink due to the attempt of wind simulation. It's a neat and a deep system with the selection of different ships, but compared to the simplicity of the rest of the active gameplay systems (minigames), it effectively acts against the game where most of the time spent dwindles to manouvering your ship back to the east to the whims of the wind which predominantly blows in one direction. I get the appeal, and Pirates! really is one of the top games with the pirate theme ever created, but it's still a bit disappointing the more you play it.

It's a classic game. More fun at higher difficulties, once you know the basics. The game has crashed on me twice at the end of tavern bounty fights on Win11. Since there is no autosave, this is a problem.