It's an OK mod for an OK game I personally never liked. I've played both OG and RealRTCW subsequently in a short span of time, and it didn't sway me to really liking the game. It doesn't change anything too much, it adds some stuff, balances weapons and enemies a bit, but leaves the most frustrating parts in, like the infamous """stealth""" mission. Can't really comment on AI changes, but I managed to cheese bottlenecks as well in RealRTCW as in the OG. It's still a sponge fest with hitscans at its core. New stuff on the other hand is a mixed bag. I quickly turned off new enemies after encountering them, same with the Malta hub. New enemies are just a pile up of sponge, and Malta hub is subpar as a content and really confusing to navigate. Feels like a bunch of 3D assets thrown together, not a real place, and pans out the time in not a pleasant way. One thing I really commend this mod for, are voice packs. English speaking Germans did really put me off when I first played the game, and were almost unbearable in recent OG playtrhough. It makes the game run more smoothly on newer systems, that's for sure.
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.
