Whether the salty smell and emerald expanse of the open sea make you want to lounge on the beach or hoist a sail, few make it through childhood without fantasizing about a life on the wild and woolly crests of the ocean. Assuming you don't have a time machine, Port Royale 3 might well be the closest you'll ever get to abandoning the tame life of the land lubber, though this swashbuckler focuses more on the booty and less on the sword fighting.
Lining up each cannon broadside on the open water takes some finesse.
Both the Adventurer and Trader campaigns begin with the same broad strokes, told mainly via simple animated cutscenes. As a Spanish traveler gung-ho to find fame and fortune in the New World in 1561 in the Adventurer half of the game, you're rescued from drowning in the Caribbean and gifted with a sturdy vessel. Choose the life of a perpetually traveling merchant with the Trader storyline, though, and you'll spend far more time exploiting the desperate needs of a multitude of far-flung ports. See, while every outpost can trade in the 20 available commodities, from wood and wheat to tobacco and textiles, each can produce only five of them.
Yes, Port Royale 3 is business simulation game in a pirate-y vein. During the early hours of play, we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps by supplying sugar to Port Royale, and then ferrying the yummy fermented result (rum!) all over the place. As we cruised around in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, we uncovered storied ports from New Orleans to Cartagena. Before long, we were raking in the gold dragging Cancun coffee to Corpus Christi, and introducing remote havens to the chocolate-y magic of the cacao bean. Be careful you leave a little for the locals, though: clean a town out of a prized good, and they'll express their anger by charging exorbitant prices in the future. On the other hand, you'll make friends fast if you care enough to haul meat and bread to famine-stricken areas, for example.
A handy rotary menu system helps you get urgent business done in a jiffy.
Accumulating wealth does more than just fill your coffers, though. As your economic situation improves, you'll gain ranks, which in turn unlock additional business opportunities. Build convoys, hire captains, and customize profitable trade routes. Establish your reputations with the French, English, Spanish, and Dutch by doing favors, and prove your worth to a fussy young damsel. You can even practically take over your favorite hideaways by building houses, staffing farms, funding church feasts, and sucking up to the local town administrator.
But what if you'd rather bully than bargain? Well, Blackbeard, put on your big boy pantaloons and fire up the Adventurer campaign. The story starts out the same, but the quests you'll encounter feature a riskier and more bloodthirsty bent. That girl you were so desperate to impress as a merchant is no longer a wench preoccupied with money and status — she's a victim of kidnapping. While you're still free to trade up a storm, you'll find you're less concerned about expanding plantations and stocking up on hemp than rescuing that poor lost soul. Along the way, you'll hunt down pirates, attack and rob trade ships, and upgrade your sailors' armaments.
Every town is a unique destination, but the important buildings are always accessible.
Combat doesn't offer the thrilling up-close din of clashing swords and supernatural oddities that define recent pirate movies, but it does open up a tense new avenue of tactical gameplay. Chase down and engage a convoy, and you may either let an automatic battle sequence play out, or take direct control of one of your ships and launch every cannonball volley yourself. Your tactics inevitably affect how much remains to plunder, too: Force enemies into shallow waters, or shred their sails, and you might manage to board them before the whole flaming mess sinks to the briny depths. Heck, if you're feeling really gutsy, you can even attack the very ports into which all this watery traffic flows. Just don't expect any governments you anger to idly tolerate your shenanigans for long.
The relatively slow pace and simulation-based approach might keep action gamers at arm's length, but we were impressed by how many different ways there are to leave your mark on Port Royale 3's many sandy shores. Who knew the booze-crazed pirates of old had so much to keep them busy?
Cameron Lewis is a freelance writer and amateur cat herder based in upstate New York. Follow him on Twitter, and be sure to visit his blog.
Source : ign[dot]com
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