Sid Meier’s Pirates!

First things first: this is an arcade game, not a sim. Unless you mean a dancing sim, that is. Game is hard to learn and easy to master (!) and gets repetitive rather fast. Took me less than six hours to advance to a stage where my my character was unstoppable (save for the dancing). Barely playable without num-pad (i.e. on laptops). Minor issues/quirks: 2) for some reason, wind direction stayed always the same (E->W).; 2) you can't/won't be hunted by more than one nation; 3) you keep previously given title and estates while the nation which gave them put a price on your head. Overall, there are free flash games out there with more depth.

and again, GOG delivers a broken game. Pirates! itself is very good, but the big brains at GOG managed to fuck it up yet again. 1. On Win10, it seems to have trouble choosing the right audio output. 2. Whenever I close the game, a big screen, asking me whether I was sure that I want to quit, covers a considerable portion of my desktop, covering everything behind it. There is no way to get rid of it, except for terminating the GOG Galaxy process from the task manager. This is unacceptable but sadly just another entry on the long list of things that GOG promises to fix but doesn't give two shits about

Pros: - Fun for about four hours - Nice CONCEPT - At first swordfights, dances, sea battles & sandbox experience seem AWESOME Cons: - Fun for about four hours - Repetitive, repetitive and repetitive - finishing the same quests over and over makes it more of a chore than fun - Being a pirate is all about dancing - and even more dancing - Swordfights are about spamming one move - Sea combat reminds two slugs trying to outmaneuver themselves - Pure nostalgia DOESNT make a great game

For the time the original game released the content may be pretty good. But 2004 or now 2016 it´s just well... Repetitive and simple. The "dancing part" is just a QTE so nothing to remember and after the 2nd time it really sucked for me. Similar thing with the fights against an enemy captain, but if you want the ship you need to do it over and over again. The trading system is pretty basic but does its job, for me its maybe too basic to become a merchant. The battles with your ship/s are again so simple that i can simply not enjoy them... at first they are a little bit tricky with your first pretty weak ship but after you get your first propper ship and a fleet the only thing you have to be careful with is the wind... If the "aiming system" would be better... The quests are the most interesting part in my opinion. Collecting info about the other great pirates and looking for them on the map (they are not marked) is fun for a time but as always in this game so simple if you found one of them its pretty much the same deal with all the others. If you want to hunt some treasures it works pretty much like the pirates. If you have the map to the chest you need to find it on your own. You also can attack cities via land and you have to play a little round base skirmish with melee and ranged units, wich you also can hide in jungle fields on the battlefield. All in all simple but fun. I just could not play this game long enough to say something about the family part so sorry for that but i´m pretty sure that you need to collect info again (with dancing...). All in all that game got me bored after 3 hours (played on steam). But i am also a fan of more complex titles normally so it is not that big of a surprise. But i wanted to point these things out for people (like i was) who don´t know this game, what they are actually buying. Cause on paper this game has massive content, but most of it is just there and you wont look at it with your ass.

Decent game, updated graphics and some tweaked gameplay on the classic formula that makes the original Pirates! from the 1980's still a game worth playing even today. This 2004 updated is however full of little WTF moments where they seem to have taken good ideas from the original games actively tried to make them worse for some reason. Very strange. That dancing minigame for example, one of the most tedious an annoying bits of mandatory grind I've ever done in a game, and this in what's otherwise mainly a free form game. Maybe next time don't let Terry from marketing do your gameplay designs eh?