As this is a serious(ish) journalistic review I will be dispensing with the pirate talk. (As I will for all my reviews) I would like to assure that this does not make me any less a pirate, this is going by the same logic as ‘it takes a real man to cry’, but as we all know real men do not cry. Despite this I am still a pirate.
In Tortuga-pirates of the new world you take on the role of a ships captain. You start off with a small ship and little money and must capture and plunder your way to a bigger ship and more money.
You receive missions from your town’s governor; you must follow and complete a series of these in order to win the campaign. However following these is not a necessity, you can play the game however you like, pirate hunter, privateer or as a pirate. I find playing the game in this sand box style is preferable to undergoing the missions partly because its fun just to concentrate on getting a big ship.
The missions suffer from being very indirect with what they want you to do. This ends up with you sailing round various parts of the map looking for a target ships (sometimes spanning half the map) or a floating piece of treasure from a sunken ship, normally one days travel away from a named port. This is all under the limited time period that they give you, resulting in very stressful missions.
There are 16 ‘different levels’. These are taking on the roles of the four playable nationalities in the four different time periods. The different nationalities are Spanish, English, Dutch and French. These all have a different level of dominance in each of the time periods resulting in for different levels of difficulty. However all play pretty much the same and the difficulty is only really changed if you start getting a bad reputation with some of the other nationalities.
Graphically the battles are satisfying. As you sustain more damage the condition of your ship changes with every hit, which is a nice. There are three types of shot, chain shot which degrades the ship faster then the others, fire shot which kills more crew and the standard shot.
The worst part of the battles is that the computer can have more then one ship, wile you can only use one (regardless of how many you have in your fleet). This can lead to you being out numbered by superior vessels. This can be even more frustrating if they choose to take your ship from you, meaning that you have to return to the starting ship.
So what score am I going to give this, well this is what makes my reviewing special. I’m not going to give it a score. I’m just going to tell you if you should or shouldn’t get it.
If you have a strong hankering to play pirate then yes get it, but I think the whole outnumbering aspect of the fights would lead me to recommend that you look around elsewhere.
In Tortuga-pirates of the new world you take on the role of a ships captain. You start off with a small ship and little money and must capture and plunder your way to a bigger ship and more money.
You receive missions from your town’s governor; you must follow and complete a series of these in order to win the campaign. However following these is not a necessity, you can play the game however you like, pirate hunter, privateer or as a pirate. I find playing the game in this sand box style is preferable to undergoing the missions partly because its fun just to concentrate on getting a big ship.
The missions suffer from being very indirect with what they want you to do. This ends up with you sailing round various parts of the map looking for a target ships (sometimes spanning half the map) or a floating piece of treasure from a sunken ship, normally one days travel away from a named port. This is all under the limited time period that they give you, resulting in very stressful missions.
There are 16 ‘different levels’. These are taking on the roles of the four playable nationalities in the four different time periods. The different nationalities are Spanish, English, Dutch and French. These all have a different level of dominance in each of the time periods resulting in for different levels of difficulty. However all play pretty much the same and the difficulty is only really changed if you start getting a bad reputation with some of the other nationalities.
Graphically the battles are satisfying. As you sustain more damage the condition of your ship changes with every hit, which is a nice. There are three types of shot, chain shot which degrades the ship faster then the others, fire shot which kills more crew and the standard shot.
The worst part of the battles is that the computer can have more then one ship, wile you can only use one (regardless of how many you have in your fleet). This can lead to you being out numbered by superior vessels. This can be even more frustrating if they choose to take your ship from you, meaning that you have to return to the starting ship.
So what score am I going to give this, well this is what makes my reviewing special. I’m not going to give it a score. I’m just going to tell you if you should or shouldn’t get it.
If you have a strong hankering to play pirate then yes get it, but I think the whole outnumbering aspect of the fights would lead me to recommend that you look around elsewhere.
This is a Spanish governor town starting town, notice the governors house in the top left. The different nationalities have different layouts.
This is an image of the towns as seen while exploring the map.
The final two screen shots are taken during battles. Notice the different types of ships and the battle damage inflicted on them.
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