Caribbean attempts to blend the Mount and Blade series with simulators like Port Royale, putting the player in charge of a small army and, depending on the chosen settings, a ship. With little to no guidance as to what to do next, you're free to roam the titular sea, land and island alike in search of fortune. The map is littered with cities, landmarks and fleets, each an interaction for your own story to unfold. Most aspects are easy to pick up, and you can tailor your character to your needs with a plethora of skills and even perks to choose upon levelup. Sadly, the game just lacks polishing in many aspects - in sea battles, your opponent can drastically reduce the crew on your flag ship by hitting your other vessels (even some you literally just captured), the dialogue options and writing leave much to be desired, trading seems rather shallow and having no way to locate governors randomly roaming the map for handing in quests is a design sin worthy of keelhauling. Also, for those of you wondering after how many times one is sick of "what shall we do with a drunken sailor", the answer is about 3. On the other hand, the game shines where M&B excels as well - the combat. Swinging onto a ship, taking out foes with muskets and pistols before drawing a cutlass and having at the enemy crew would likely even make Errol Flynn himself proud. As someone who loved both Mount and Blade and Port Royale, I am really torn on this one. I want to love it to bits, but I can't overlook some of the more glaring issues. It is worth giving a try, especially for those wanting a more maritime spin on Mount and Blade, but it really, really lacks polish for a full recommendation. I do, however, know that this is a game I will likely play in bursts every now and then.
Ah, Sacred 2. I actually have a physical copy of it still sitting around somewhere, and although I absolutely love RPGs, I never went past the first part for several reasons, the least being the repetitiveness that comes with the genre - you can hardly get anywhere without killing at least a legion of rather clueless monsters, which will soon do very little for your XP bar. The second reason were the rather frequent crashes, which may or may not have been fixed at some point - to be fair, it's been a while since I touched Sacred 2. But by far the worst thing was an escort quest where you had to get two soldiers back to safety. A trivial task, considering the two clueless combatants were surprisingly tough, but as soon as they entered about the same hemisphere as an enemy, they would engage it in combat while CONSTANTLY yelling "the entire company to me!" and "help, I am being attacked" or something. And I mean constantly as in without any break, making you pretty much want to switch sides and splatter your escortees across several monster lairs. When the game crashed just as I was about to be finally able to turn in that quest, I decided to just play something else. Which is a shame, because I really liked the first Sacred and the skill combo and customisation system.
I've sunk way too many hours and ships in the original Port Royale, so of course I had to check the second installment for myself once it came out on GOG. For newcomers to the series: Port Royale is a trade simulation that puts you into the shoes of a merchant in the colonial times, with your overarching goal varying based on the choice of scenario. The trading is pretty much unchanged - each town has it's own set of goods it produces and needs, allowing you to soon grasp where to buy cheap and sell with a profit. I think they pretty much nailed it in the first game, so not changing that was probably for the better. Sea fights have changed quite a bit - you now only send in your designated war ships, one at a time, against the enemy fleet. While this is not too difficult, the ridiculously tiny sea map forces you to constantly turn, often leaving you vulnerable for a few broadsides if you don't want to accidentally leave the map, which would take this ship out of the battle. Attacking targets on land is slightly different, but becomes somewhat tedious once you got the hang of it. The same can be said about the swordfighting minigame you will find yourself forced into every so often - once you figure out how to time your attacks, each fight pretty much indistinguishable from the dozens you've had already. Aside of that, you still have your ammo types, weapon types and just the right amount of complexity to make the battles still overall engaging. Once you've made a name for yourself, be it by trading or raiding ships, you may also find yourself in the service of one of the many governors, which can come with a wide array of rewards ranging from trade licenses to powerful ships to your very own city! Serving one nation may, of course, seriously annoy another as there are constantly shifting relationships between the dominant nations. Final verdict: mostly the same game as the first, still highly enjoyable. I'll give it 3/5 due to the forced minigames though.
Star Wolves 2 starts on a very low note, as the intro already shows some of the worst attrocious voice actings I've ever heard - delivered without any sense of passion and punctuation, sometimes the speaker even pauses during line breaks! The game mostly plays like the original Star Wolves - mothership, equipment, even the characters are pretty much instantly familiar to players of the first part. Speaking of equipment... you start the game with tier 2 equipment, which in itself is okay, I guess, but the game features randomly generated optional missions, some of which paying out a whopping 500k and more, which instantly allows you to upgrade all your stuff to the best money can buy. The worst bit about those missions, however, is not the danger - it's having to trudge across multiple pretty much completely empty systems. You accept the mission in a star base, travel towards your client (often through several systems...), then towards your goal, then back to the client. Any threat that may have been present will not respawn or be randomly generated, so once you cleared out a system of the 1-2 enemy squads inhabiting it, you'll have a completely safe passage. Not that you'd need it after the aforementioned quick upgrade to space-godlike equipment. The story might be nonlinear, I will never know - in one of the early missions, I decided to help out some pirates, which seems to have insulted the game so much that it decided never to give me a main objective again. To make things worse, the game also crashed a lot. Entering starbases, leaving them, travelling through systems, entering combat, picking up stuff, equipping your fighters... all those things were likely to crash the game, which means you'll also have to save your game more often than would be convenient. This is pretty much Steam Greenlight levels of bad, but we are talking about something that is sold as a finished product here.
