Pirates of the Burning Sea

First and foremost, I discover that unless you're going to play the heavy Naval class - or either class if you're a Pirate - trying to do ship battles as they appear in the movies is a fairly quixotic strategy. Even as I gain enough levels and doubloons (currency) to graduate to the sexier and super-fast Bermuda Sloop ship, I still find myself getting slaughtered fairly regularly in even the most basic missions or PvP battles. The reason for this is that every ship has a certain amount of armour on its starboard, port, stern, and bow sides. If one of those sides loses its armour completely, the ship starts sustaining heavy damage, and will, ultimately, sink.

I'd been trying to stage explosive broadside battles with my on-sea opponents - endlessly circling each other, trying not to get caught sailing against the wind, firing off my limited range of cannons the second they were loaded - and frequently finding myself in need of a quick and shameful escape. When I started playing to my class and vessel's advantages - that is, skill in boarding enemy ships and the Bermuda's envious speed - I began succeeding more often, and feeling much better about my abilities as a skipper. The variety of tactical options Pirates presents to you in naval warfare is outstanding, and if you have the patience to really develop your own strategy, I doubt this side of the game could ever become stale, especially when other players are involved.

It's a shame, then, that the avatar fighting - called "Swashbuckling" here - is bizarrely anaemic. This was one of the primary complaints levelled at the game on release, and I'm quite surprised so little has been done about it. Where ship battles are sensibly paced, open-ended, and richly tactical, Swashbuckling is a frenetic, over-simplified shambles. It's obvious Flying Labs was aiming for a compromise between the real-time action on offer in the naval component and the turn-based hitpoint-trading present in most MMOs, but the result is a total misfire. As you level up, you're given Swashbuckling points which you can invest into one of three fighting schools - the defense-oriented Florentine, attack-focused Fencing, or all-rounder Dirty Fighting. And, in a fashion roughly analogous to standard MMO skill trees, you earn increasingly elaborate and powerful sets of attacks, blocks, and parries.

The problem is, even the old-school Diku monsters like World of Warcraft and the EverQuest sisters do a much better job of conveying weight and connection in combat than this supposedly more progressive variant. Your NPC crew members - who come to assist you in waves, which you can call at your leisure - as well as your enemy's move at a speed that would rival my teenage sister and her squadmates at the mention of Robert Pattinson out of Twilight. Targeting is disconcertingly unresponsive and fickle, and there's not nearly enough visual feedback present to give you a sense of what you and your enemy are actually doing. This isn't so much of a problem when you're taking part in wide-open fort assaults and land battles - of which there are quite a few in the game's many and generally inventive quest lines - but in boarding combat, where everyone is cramped into a very small space and you're tasked with taking down a single captain until he stops respawning, it's a chaotic and unrewarding experience.

I wouldn't describe Swashbuckling as a game-breaker by any means; it's more arduous than wholly off-putting. And I'm sure, too, that there are experienced players who've grown accustomed to its heavily obfuscated rhythm and know how to exploit it to their advantage. Overall, though, given the amount of polish and detail lavished upon Pirates' ship component, it's disheartening that the Swashbuckling gameplay still feels so rushed and perfunctory in comparison. Frankly, I got a much stronger whiff of Errol Flynnery from the ultra-basic rhythm-action sword-slinging component in the eminently playable 2004 retread of Sid Meier's Pirates!.