TORTUGA PIRATES OF THE NEW WORLD

 PC CD ROM

You are a captain in the Caribbean; you are forced to start off your work for the country of Spain in the first of 4 time periods present in the game. Your mission, to capture 3 foreign ports/towns (belonging to the other 3 nations in the game: France, England or Holland). This seems a simple task at first, but it turns out to be quite the daunting adventure. You start off with a small ship, a crew of 50 men and a bunch of cannons. All right, we have all the essentials so let’s be on our way and get this first and easy mission out of the way. 2 hours later and I have yet to capture my first bloody port. This brings us to our first type of battle in the game. In order to capture or in most cases loot an enemy town, you have to take out the town's defenses, and then your men will proceed into the town to loot it taking the money and in some cases goods as well. Capturing a town is easier said than done with just one ship and a handful of cannons, and you will first have to do a lot of sub-missions before you are ready. The other type of battles you can immerse yourself in, is sea battles. They are relatively straightforward; you control the ship with the mouse, move with the right button and fire your cannons with the left one. You have a status window in the left part of the screen where you can switch between ammunition types. Combating several ships at once can be quite difficult, but once you get used to this type of play it’s a lot of fun.



When visiting a friendly port the player can engage himself in a wide variety of activities. The towns consist of a number of buildings. There is the merchant where you can trade away the goods that you have acquired by looting other ships and towns, or that you acquired by buying goods for lower prices in some towns an selling them in others for higher prices when they are scarce (duh). Another building is the tavern, here you can enjoy a game of (not so very) friendly dice for a sum of money of your choice; you can also sometimes meet people here that want to hire you for a mission or maybe sell you a treasure map or two. The third building I want to mention is the shipyard, here you can repair your ships, sell ships you have captured or no longer need etc. etc. In some towns there is also a governor’s mansion where you can get news and take missions for the crown. Before you can partake in any missions you will first have to gain some notoriety. You can do this for example by capturing or killing some notorious pirates, each town has a list of pirates currently wanted for crimes against the crown. The list shows the name of the pirate, the last location he was seen and how dangerous he is. You can also choose to just ignore the whole working for the crown concept and become a pirate of your own; you will however gain a bad rep with the nation whose ships you loot and they will open fire when you try to sail into one of their ports. When you've had enough of your adventures you can sail into a friendly port, divide the loot and get some early retirement. Besides offering a good amount of strategy gameplay there are also a lot of adventure elements for the player to enjoy. This adds considerably to the replay value of the game. After gaining some status you can start doing some sub missions for the governor of the nation that employs you as well. This ranges from exploration missions to hunting down sunken treasures and important documents.