Sea Dogs: City of Abandoned Ships

This is really an excellent development on Sid Meier's Pirates! formula and I've spent hundreds of hours playing it. It now has skills, companions, randomized missions and several proper questlines; also you're no longer just a ship and can roam around in human form. Though thankfully the dance minigame didn't make it here. Be warned however, it is not newbie friendly in the slightest: interface is somewhat odd, you really should check the manual to get how some things work; any first time player can forget about setting difficulty above easiest because even "normal" is quite brutal; and campaign start as Peter Blood is not a tutorial you'd probably expect, but a fairly tough advanced start scenario.

If you love sailing, naval combat and being a pirate captain, then this game is really good. Playing this game is like having a romantic relationship with your ship. The ship itself is so beautifully modeled, the sea is so alive. When you are standing on your ship at sea, you see the entire ship is in motion with the waves, you hear squeaking of the ship, the sea water brushing against the hull, the wind blowing on the sail, and beautiful music playing in the background, right there and then you know this game is worth the money. I would be happy just to experience the feeling of sailing the ocean. This game's engine is really old and have not been developed a lot over the years, so its game mechanics is relatively primitive, but for so little money you are getting a lot of game here.

i LOVE this game, i have been playing it since 2008 when it was on disk, it is a true pirate RPG, its fun, simple, and has LOTS of content. although it may have a few bugs it is definantly my favorite game of all time

It's really the best one. There are a lot of things and mechanics in the game. Something like Elite in pirate setting. Even in nowadays graphics looks good enough. But some problems can be met, because of specific Storm engine, which was used for this game. Sadly, but it doesn't work under wine on Linux. But ones again, you can find nothing better than this game about pirates. Maybe some days we will see remake... I hope.

I was hyped by the other reviews. The game does seem ambititious. I've put 2.5 hours into it and it just hasn't been fun. The controls and camera are atrocious. The dialogue and narrative are entertaining, but the quests themselves seem mechanically tedious. I don't see how you can reliably play this without save-scumming every battle. For some reason the manual is missing on the GOG release, but you can Google it.