First off I start by saying this was one of the games that came with my first PC in the mid 90s and I have a lot of fond memories of being huddled around this game with my friends trying to solve puzzles and work my way through the game. Buying this game all these years later (as I never completed it the first time around) I worried my memories of the game wouldn't hold up. They did....at least for the most part. The graphics haven't aged at all well, however I still have a fondness for them that probably boils down to nostalgia. The music however is still fantastic and is what gives the game its sense of atmosphere. The puzzles are largely logical and well thought out, although I admit I had to look up a guide due to the sheer frustration of the puzzle involving flicking coloured balls into their respective slots. The few cut scenes that you will find in the game are all super cheesy in the best way. There are a few frustrations early on, such as having to solve a not overly fun puzzle every time you want to get in an elevator but as you open up more and more of the doors and shortcuts you should find you can stop using elevators almost entirely and will be speeding around the museum in no time at all. For less than $5 I'd say you should get a few hours of puzzle based fun out of it, even if you then never play it again as it doesn't have a massive amount of replay value if I'm honest.
First of all, let me say my game play experience comes from owning the release on the original Xbox so I cannot comment on the PC version which as I understand had a few extra elements removed from the Xbox version (if memory serves I remember reading something about an additional mini game centred around finding the lost cities in the PC version, where in the Xbox version I think you just needed to land near them to find them). This game is very much a case of whether you can overcome a certain lack of depth within most aspects of the game play experience in exchange for a greater breadth of game play styles within Pirates that you may not find in some other games. It also has a great deal of charm and succeeds in creating for me what felt like a living, breathing world to travel within and make alliances and enemies by the score. Most importantly I felt like allowed me to tell (or at least try to tell) the story I wanted to tell in that particular play through. Want to be a main driven by nothing but greed of treasure? Go for it. You want to be a famous pirate hunter? Sure thing. Want to pursue your dream of reuniting with your family? Make it so. You could even try making a fortune purely as a trader if that takes your fancy. The game never tells you that pursuing any or all of these is wrong and you can be who you want to be. The worst that will happen is you will be told you retired to be an unknown scalliwag in the back of beyond. My only negative in the game is that while there is theoretically a time limit on the game (as you age or become injured the minigames become more difficult and punishing and you essentially end up being forced into retirement), you are often able to complete most of if not all of the major goals of the game and rather than feeling like a different character/story each time, it ends up feeling like the same character/story multiple times over, but when the game is this fun I felt that was a relatively minor complaint. Recommended
