First of all, I love pirates stories. Not that I know much about them, and honestly I think that not all “Pirates of the Caribbean” were enjoyable. I like the stories and treasure hunting lifestyle of pirates. There’s something about the pirates that just make many boys and men (or even girls and women) to fantasize their adventures and romance. But to enjoy the culture of pirates doesn’t mean that I have to precisely know all the accurate information about them, correct?
Well, apparently, Playlogic and Akella didn’t think so. If you want to play Age of Pirates 2: City of Abandoned Ships, you just have to know much about them; and with some very accurate information in player’s mind. And spending few hours with the title, you’ll immediately feel the need of knowledge about the era of pirates. The game literally asks quizzes related to the pirates! Rather than generalizing the games to the main public, Playlogic and Akella sailed this ship to the blue ocean. And for this reason, it’ll be hard for anyone to judge AoP2 as a great game or not, unless if you’re a true fan of The Golden Age of Piracy.
The player can choose from three different types of hero — Adventurer, Corsair and Merchant. Controlling the characters itself isn’t much hard, but this title goes a bit deep with few RPG elements, and for that you’ll just have to go through many mistakes to learn the game. There’s no shortcut. In fact, you won’t even know if you’re taking a shortcut or not in the early quests of main story line. AoP2 demands to be a bit more accurate than all the other pirates games, so don’t even think about finding a map or a compass on your screen in early stage. There is a feature where you can teleport to the main buildings such as tavern or the church, but it is limited so make sure you really concentrate on the game and get into it.
If you’re one of the gamer who appreciate the open world in games, you might like this game more than the others. Besides the main quests and missions, there are many other side quests to distract you from the main story line. This doesn’t mean that you can interact with anything or just go anywhere with space; the surroundings are limited to certain point. Even then, I personally was lost many times; and spending hours did a little help. And lack of in-depth tutorial doesn’t help either.
Graphics are pretty decent. Not the best we have seen yet, but you wouldn’t be easily disappointed. The graphic isn’t the problem with AoP2; I’m more concerned about the design. No matter how far you travel or how many people you meet in this game, you’ll be likely to see them again and again. This goes same for the dialogues and the audio. They’re in higher quality than expected, but many times repetitive. It won’t hurt the gameplay most of the time, but it would have been great to see more variety of basic elements of the game to enhance the feel of world-size scale.
You cannot truly say that you’re a pirate unless you’re involved with at least one of two battles on the ocean. Flying cannon balls, sailing into the right direction, AoP2 has it all. But the pace of the battle system can feel a bit slow. AoP2 tries its best to translate the true life of pirates as close as possible, but that doesn’t mean everyone will agree to it. It’s not a bad design though; I’m sure there are gamers out there who would be accustomed to enjoy it.
The first few tries with AoP2, we had some doubts with the game, so we searched around with web to see what real pirate fans think about it. In the end, we were surprised by the amount of support the AoP2 is getting. Sure, they don’t represent the general public, but if you are into the pirates, this title may be just the treasure that they were looking for. Our guess is that the common gamers with little knowledge of the pirates won’t get by easy.
Just how far are you willing to spend your time just to enjoy this game? Answers to this question may vary, and this very conflict cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”. And getting used to the AoP2 controls and game system is time consuming compared to the most games. If you don’t have enough time to sink hours everyday for many days, there’s a good chance that you’ll give up on early quests. But, if you’re willing to give it a try, invest hours and hours in the name of pirate love, you might be rewarded with a great fun.
Our Score: 7 /10
Fans of The Golden Age of Piracy would treasure this title; not much for the others though.
