Sid Meier's Pirates! (Live the Life)

Rating:

Sid Meier's Pirates is a mixed bag. The game is fun to play for a few days, but it's incredibly short and with little replay value unless you enjoy doing the same thing over and over again. It promises exploration and excitement, but delivers long periods of waiting for the wind to pick up and propel your war galleon across the sea. It supposedly has four different time periods of piracy to play in, but the only difference is in the level of fun, not difficulty or content. You get to swordfight with scurvy pirate captains, sneak into towns, attack towns and install new governors, trade goods, attack ships, buy items, recruit crew members, search for treasure and your long lost family, and even ballroom dance. The main problem is that every aspect of the game is simplified to its basic elements and rendered repetitious.

In the long run, the game is best for gamers who don't like to spend a lot of time on games. Pirates is fairly easy to play for a few minutes and come back to whenever you want without having to remember a lot of details. Unfortunately for me, the repetitious nature of the game has become far too tedious.

Rating:

This game is AWESOME when you first start playing it. The graphics and colors are excellent. It is alot of fun swordfighting, blasting cannons at ships, and many others. I wish there could of been a multiplayer feature built in to play with or against a buddy. I wish there wa smore to romancing the daughters also. I wish the top 10 pirates were a little more harder to catch as well. Once you find them and kill them, the challenege of finding them is gone and they are dead forever. It would of been nice to allow them to escape a few times or allow you to maroon them or walk a plank or something.

Overall the game is a B+ and is a good buy.

Rating:

If you get a chance to rent the PSP or XBox version do that, or wait till the game costs about the same as a rental because it's only fun for about day or 2 and then becomes very repetitious and boring.

When I first started playing the game I was amazed by the interactivity of the ocean, but soon became annoyed by the endless tiresom traveling from one city to another just to find the next part of a map. Everything looks the same and blends together after the first 3 hours of playing.

All in all, it's a great game to rent or pay less then $5 for, but don't buy it for $20.

Rating:

It could have been better. Sid Meier is a fantastic game-maker, and I hear the original was great. This is apparently a decent remake, however the repetition starts to grate upon you after your fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth time around. It's true that you can increase difficulty, which makes it a bit better, but still....Fights are very scripted and end ususally the same way. Dancing and socializing is more like playing "Simon Says." Perhaps this is why Pirates! went extinct on the high seas so many years ago? They all fell asleep at the wheel and were lost at sea....

Rating:

I bought this game on a whim and am so glad I did! I've stayed up later than I should have every day this week playing it and it is still just as fun as the very first time. What's better than fencing and treasure hunting? Nothing! It's worth every penny spent.

I am disappointed that I couldn't be a female pirate though. But I've gotten over it.