Sid Meier's Pirates!

"Repetitive Game Play makes for a quickly tiring experience"

In Sid Meier's Pirates you start off as a young pirate who is seeking revenge on a man who kidnapped your family many years ago.

Game Play:
The game play experience just consists of you doing mini-games again, and again, and again, and again...Well, you get the idea. You spend most of your time sailing the sea on your ship and looking for towns to go to. While sailing you have the option of fighting other pirates and taking their money and ship. To fight some other ship of pirates you must first find a ship, you can fight any ship you want. Then you just sit and fire cannonballs at each other until the ship sinks or until you crash into each other and are forced to sword fight the captain of the ship. Once you defeat him, you have the option of taking all of the money and stuff on the ship and keeping the boat or just sinking it. Of course after all of the cannons being fired at the ship, it takes quite a bit of damage and won't sail as fast. You can repair the ship by heading to your nearest town and paying for the cost of repairs. While you're there you can also buy upgrades for your ship, like cotton sails (makes your ship sail faster) and cannon upgrades.

The other mini game you can find is dancing with the Governor of that town's daughter as soon as you're well known enough to be seen with her. The more attractive the daughter, the harder it is to win her over. To win over the girl's heart is rather easy. Just dance with her a few times and give her a gift then rescue her from her inevitable kidnapping. After that you're welcome to marry her if you want or you can dance with even more girls. I seriously think in my first play through I played that dancing mini game well over 200 times.

Graphics:
Everything is very bright and colorful. The graphics aren't spectacular, but they still are very nice looking.

Sound:
There's nice little pirate themed music in the background and it sounds great. All of the sound effects are really wonderful. When cruising the sea you can hear the wind flapping through the sails and the seagulls flying around. What little talking there is in this game is in, of course, Simlish (the little nonsense language that all the Sims speak.)

Should you buy this game?
I would give it a rent first. I was quickly tired with this game since it really just consists of playing the same little mini-games again and again.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/15/05