The "deeper" concept sounds like gaming gold: your individual pirate has a series of stats and skills relating to swordplay, naval tactics, navigation, etc. You'll handpick a crew with their own skills and abilities, assigning each to fulfill individual roles on your ship. Even your fleet can be customized, outfitted with different hulls or cannons, supplied with an assortment of ammo, flying flags of your choice. Naval battles put you right on the deck of your vessel, trying to get the weather gage on your opponent, loading and firing broadsides in a fairly deep naval simulation. But the lofty promise of the game, like so much pirate treasure, remains buried under a poor implementation. All of the above elements are in the game, but jammed into a clunky interface, and spaced out between plodding and sometimes frustrating gameplay. Age of Pirates isn't a total wash -- it's certainly a good-looking game -- but only the most patient of players will be able to overlook the many flaws.
The Beauty of the Sea
First, the good news: Age of Pirates can be stunningly beautiful, especially when you're out at sea. The rendering of the water, with its undulating waves and swells reacting to different lighting conditions, is incredible. Watching a sunset gleam through partially translucent sails as you quietly glide over gentle rollers near a sleepy Caribbean port is breathtaking.
The ships aren't empty shells, either. You can see your individual crewmen, often dressed in your home navy's colors, strolling along the decks, climbing the rigging, or loading and firing the guns. It can be dizzying watching crewmen try to furl your sails during a roaring hurricane-style storm at sea, with black waves crashing over the deck. Occasionally you can also see sharks gliding along underwater.
And while the town graphics don't live up to the graphics at sea, they're still packed with detail. Fish nets hang out to dry along the docks, and ruined buildings still show fresh cannonball scars and musket-ball holes while broken shutters hang limply off of their hinges. Age of Pirates has a great lived-in feel to it.
Aarrrrrr!!
The open-ended nature of the game is a real positive -- there are lots of ways for a player to pursue profit and promotion. However, Age of Pirates doesn't ease the player into the world. You're literally dropped onto a dock, given half of a map that you can't do anything with yet, and turned loose on your own with no guidance about where to go next. Your starting island may have only a couple of missions available, with seemingly random difficulty.
And the game isn't very friendly when it comes to just exploring and figuring things out. The interfaces are often needlessly complicated. For example, the shopping interface takes up the whole screen, yet nowhere on this giant dialogue is there a description of the item you want to buy. To find that out, you have to mouse over the name of the item and hold down the right mouse button to see what it does or if your character can actually use it. It's especially frustrating because all of the mid- to high-level items are identified by nicknames on the shopping screen, so you have zero idea what's actually in the store at first glance.