Good piratical games are hard to find. A lot of them are bad tie-ins to movies or other fictional properties. When they’re good, they often come in different forms from puzzle games like Monkey Island to arcade sims like Pirates! to deep ship sims like Age of Sail 2 to not much else. Often the vicious, dangerous world of piracy and funny accents is coupled with a truly atrocious game. Age of Pirates 2 is an interesting game even before you play it. It’s an open (relatively) world adventure ship-sim RPG. If that sounds impressive, even ambitious, then that’s because it is. This game is trying to meld the broad styles of Pirates! with the deep tactics of Age of Sail along with elements from Fable 2.
It’s quite a tall order when you think about it, and Age of Pirates 2 is an extremely difficult game to like, let alone play. It takes all of the elements mentioned above and makes them more complicated and deep whenever possible. You can do things in this game that most similar games can only dream of. The problem is that it’s hard to do almost any of these individual things well, let alone all of them.
In Age of Pirates 2, you start as a captain, pick one of a set number of faces and classes, and learn some basic pirating skills. From there, you’ll land at the nearest port, arm yourself, pick up a few jobs, and sail out into the Caribbean. Right off the bat, you’ll be schooled in the harsh, deadly methods of the AI ships and pirates. Your first (probably unwanted or accidental) ship-to-ship battles will be decided slowly, but you’ll definitely lose in naval battle or as part of a boarding party.
At first, I chalked my failures up to the game’s controls. In melee combat, your character moves slowly, attacks more slowly, and enters and exits every fight at a glacial, awkward pace. Your controls often seem to fail or work slowly, contributing to this awful feel. That’s just in hand-to-hand combat. Ship combat is slightly better. Your ship handles well enough, but when it comes to firing your cannons, you have two options. The first is a third person (outside of the ship) viewpoint. When you order your ship to fire, they’ll do so by auto-targeting the enemy. If they fire at all, that is. Often you’ll find yourself frantically pressing the fire button as enemies approach only to be thrashed by several ships long before you’ve actually fired a shot.
Luckily, there’s another option, the first person “commander’s” view from the deck of the ship. From here, you can manually aim the cannons, though you will have to compensate for the distance to the target and the pitch and roll of the ship. It sounds quite exciting: a game of skill, where the best shooter wins. In practice, firing cannons is anything but easy. It’s frustrating, highly inaccurate for most of the early to middle game (before your cannon skill raises) and just feels loose.
The game’s graphics are extremely mediocre. The animations are stiff, the explosions and lighting are wretched, and the voice work is even worse. The dialogue itself puts all this to shame. It’s stilted, long-winded, and obtuse and bears all of the marks of poor localization. In general, it’s as unpleasant a game to watch as it is to listen to.
If the game’s adventure, trading, and diplomatic elements were well-implemented, one might be able to look past these faults or at least ignore them for a period of time. They certainly are extensive especially the trading and shipping elements. Much like in more complicated 4X games like X3, you’ll need to learn the best places to ship to and from, the best boats to ship goods in, and how much protection you’ll need along the way. Likewise, you’ll need to figure out how to disguise your ship as an enemy’s or meet secretly with diplomats and smugglers. It’s just that none of it is any fun and none of it is easy to learn or master.
There’s not that much more to say about AoP 2. It has a great deal of potential that’s for sure. It tries to dabble in so many things, it was almost a given that it would fail. To pull this off, you would need a studio with a mastery of most of these genres and the ability to really create unique experiences in-game. Again, none of this is executed in AoP 2. It’s an exercise in failure from gameplay and graphics to localization. Maybe Playlogic can polish this game and release a better version of the game. They have a lot of work ahead of them if they’re ever going to make Age of Pirates 2 a really quality title.