The controls are absolutely terrible. The mouse is useless, as Privateer interprets the mouse as a joystick. The keyboard and joystick are so coarse as to make effective targeting next to impossible. The graphics were fine back in 1993. The pixel replication just looks lousy nowadays. The story, it's okay. Better than many. There are some parts that are extremely grindy, and the missions don't have a whole lot of variety. My favorite part was always running trade routes (especially contraband) and seeing how much money I could stack up, but the random nature of the encounters takes some of the shine off. Better controls, functional joystick calibration, and key remapping would boost Privateer up to three, or maybe even four stars. As it is, I'm being generous giving it a two. There's just no fun to be had here.
*sigh* I really, really wanted to like this game. The graphics and art design are stunning, the story is compelling without being too overwrought, and the gameplay, at least for the first third, was terrific. The problem is, the difficulty ramps up *hard* about a third of the way in. It goes from 'challenging but fun' to 'requires long strings of absolutely pixel-perfect timing' over the course of twenty minutes or so. Pretty soon, I'd had enough. The game stopped being fun, and turned into an incredibly frustrating grind. Note that most of the games' challenges are maneuver-based, so cranking the difficulty setting down doesn't have any real effect. Two stars is harsh, but fair. Ori and the Blind Forest really failed the most important test - is it fun to play? If you're a hardcore platformer enthusiast with hummingbird-like reflexes, you'll probably dig it a lot more than I did.
