Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat

"Arr, matey! Ye be a fool to not pick this one up!"

At E3, a lot of people seemed to take interest in a certain game that would later be re-named, “Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat”. It is, after all, a very original premise for a game. How many games based on pirates can you name? After the game had been delayed and then finally released, a lot of the people who thought it was cool decided that it just wasn’t very good. However, I still thought that even though it wasn’t exactly ground-breaking, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t a fun game.

The characters have quite a bit of detail in them, but the environments usually don’t. Each of the islands you find in certain areas look the same. If there’s a group of 3 islands in a certain place, chances are they’ll all look almost the same. The water looks great, however. It shimmers and ripples very realistically, and the exploding ships are really beautiful. The cut scenes look great too! I love the opening scene, when the sword fight breaks out. It just seems to stick out in my mind.

Kat’s so cool. I love it when you pick up a glass of grog and she blurts out, “Mmmmm... Grog!!” Also, when you’re near treasure, she says, “I smell gold!”. You gotta love that. The music is also fairly good, with some nice sounding tunes here and there. The sound effects are also accurate, with the normal clanking noises when hitting baddies with your sword, jumping around on the ground, etc. All of the characters have very good voice-acting. The old salt sounds very convincingly like a grubby old pirate, Kat sounds like a ruff and ready pirate queen, and everyone else you’ll find has a great voice.

All of the music is well composed and sounds really piratey. Each group of islands has it’s own song and they all sound equally good. Plus, the song on the title screen is really foreboding and simply put, cool.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “Is this game’s storyline original?” and the answer would be, YES! This game has a very nice story. Here is the introduction to the storyline, found in the instruction book.

“Ten years ago, the Pirates of Skull Cove were a band of misfits set on high adventure and gaining the riches of the Five Seas. Despite their blatant acts of piracy they acted as an unofficial government, protecting the many colonies from murderous scum and would-be dictators. They had their own harsh but fair code of honor; all who ran up the white flag were spared, no one was robbed who couldn’t afford to lose the money. The Pirates of Skull Cove grew rich and powerful on the loot from fat merchant vessels that sailed with their mystic Chartstones between the ports of the Five Seas. After a long and profitable career their leader, Mara Rousseau, decided that it was time to settle down. She married the handsome governor Marcus de Leon of the Pirate Isles, and gave up the sea for a life with the man she loved and their new daughter.

Mara, however, had made enemies in her long career as a scourge of the seas. Her past came back to haunt her with a challenge she could not return away from. Leaving her husband and daughter behind, she went out to sea and did not return again, at least not alive. Marcus vowed that Mara’s past would never reach the ears of Katarina, his daughter - she would lead a normal, law-abiding life.

Katrina, however, had other plans.

When Captain Hawke and his Crimson Guard begain taking over the islands of the Five Seas, Katarina now grown into a strong and beautiful woman, could not sit idly by and watch innocent people subjected to theft and slaughter. She gathered together a crew of like minded men and, christening her new ship the Wind Dancer, she raided Crimson Guard ships and used the loot to help those people hurt by Captain Hawke’s rise to power. Unbeknownst to Kat, she had begun to follow in her mother’s footsteps. It was only a matter of time before Captain Hawke’s gaze turned to the young Katarina de Leon...”

Not too shabby, eh? After this, you’ll set forth on a huge journey, filled with tons of menacing pirates, huge ship battles, and lots and lots and lots of TREASURE! Kat, like every other pirate out there, never passes up any good booty (if she ever passes up the other type of booty we’ll never know..) and she’ll always alert you if there’s any buried treasure around. Don’t worry if you don’t have the key, you’ll get all of them eventually. Then it’s just a matter of back-tracking to get all of those treasure chests.

There really isn’t any replayability. However, there are a ton of chests and sea-shells to collect in the game. You get different extras in the scrapbook for ever sea-shell you collect, so for all of you completionists out there, you’ll want to collect everything there is to see all of the art-work and such in the scrapbook.

The game doesn’t seem that original in the gameplay department, until of course, you get to the ship battles! Yes, there are ship battles, using your very own pirate ship. Usually you'll be fighting little dingies that don't take very much effort to take down. Thankfully, you'll be able to fight a few huge ships that are a real challenge to take down. You can even upgrade your tiny vessel, many times. Go from the small privateer to the giant 36 cannon Man-O-War. The camera views can be a little annoying at times in the ship battle mode, but you’ll get over it.

You should definitely pick up Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat. It’s an extremely huge adventure that spans a huge number of islands with so much to do you won’t put it down no matter what!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 02/16/03, Updated 07/10/03