Dexter

The life of a pirate must have been pretty rough, and being rough is one thing Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales certainly nails down pat. This convoluted, buggy game greatly overextends itself, presenting an open-ended role-playing experience that combines ship-to-ship combat and on-foot exploration throughout the Caribbean islands during the golden age of piracy. This game might as well be a sequel to the developers' previous piracy games, including 2003's Pirates of the Caribbean and 2000's Sea Dogs, so it's a shame that the broader, more ambitious scope of this latest take on the formula just leads to more problems.

If you liked Sid Meier's Pirates!, then keep playing it instead of this.

Much like Akella's previous games, in Age of Pirates you play as a freebooter looking for fame and fortune on the high seas. You can choose to play as either a male or female character, and you start off with a modest ship and crew, and may then proceed to go wherever you like in the Caribbean. Whether you either take on missions for the various European nations that have set up camp on the isles or plunder their merchant vessels is pretty much up to you. By completing various quests and sinking or successfully boarding enemy ships, you'll gain levels of experience that let you customize your sea captain's abilities. You also need to be mindful of your ship's crew--their health, morale, and salaries--and may employ officers to help you navigate and fight. There's a lot to think about and to do in Age of Pirates. If only it all worked as well as could reasonably be expected.

The game gets off to a worrisome start by presenting you with a screen dense with different gameplay options, such as nation progress rate, encounter frequency, sailing settings, and simplified sea artificial intelligence. There's also an overall difficulty option, but it's hard not to presume that a game presenting this fine a level of customization right off the bat is a game that isn't trying very hard to deliver a well-balanced experience. Indeed, Age of Pirates often feels aimless, and the simple text-based quests you'll be given are hardly incentive enough to hold interest. The character-leveling system is probably the most compelling reason to keep playing, but the longer you play, the more the game seems to unravel. Open-ended games ought to reward experimentation and exploration, but this one is almost as likely to crash on you as you keep doing things your way.

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