Pirates of the Caribbean Online Review

Pirates of the Caribbean Online

State: Final
Website: http://www.piratesonline.com
Developer/Publisher: Disney.com Games
The Pitch: Set sail on the vast blue waters of the Caribbean in search of adventure, fortune, and fame in the world of the infamous Jack Sparrow and the evil Jolly Roger.

That’s reasonably accurate. If you liked the movie and you enjoy playing with stuffed animals, this is likely your game… because this game is targeted squarely at kids, even though there may be enough to like here for adults as well.

 

The Caveat

 

The free version of the game limits you in a variety of ways. First and foremost, you must play the game in a window and you are subjected to ads. The maximum resolution for your windowed experience is 1024×768. The game window runs at 1280×1024, with the ads included, but your viewport stays at 1024×768.

In addition, you are exempt from the following:

Unlimited access to all weapons and skills
Create and lead a Pirate guild
Access to advanced ships
Customize your Pirate with clothing, tattoos and more
Create up to 4 avatars
Access to all game chapters and quests
Engage in Boss battle
Access to all the Caribbean islands
Ad-free gameplay

That’s a pretty substantial list of limitations on top of the windowed, ad-riddled game window. A membership will run you $5 for your first month and $10 for every month after that.

 

Unique to Pirates of the Caribbean Online

 

Theme. No elves or dwarves here, no sir. This is chock-full of Pirate-y goodness, with lots of Yarrrr and swabbing of the deck, matey! Of course it’s not completely unique; there’s also Pirates of the Burning Sea, with which it shares the theme. But in the vast sea of Elf-peppered MMOs, a Pirate theme certainly stands out.

Voodoo magic. Well they couldn’t leave magic out entirely, right? That would just be madness! MADNESS! So they threw in a pseudo-hot Voodoo witch doctor to train you up but quick on how to destroy your enemies (which is to say nearly everyone) with glowing balls of voodoo.

Ship combat. Once again, done in Burning Sea. I know. Just ignore that for a moment. Whereas in PotBS Ship combat is its own little strategy game, here it’s more like a car race with guns. There’s not a lot of depth to it, but it’s hella fun when you sink a Galleon 4 levels above you. It’s not super-fast, mind you, but that’s a good thing when you’ve got no crew and you have to shoot the guns yourself.

Performance

 

Considering the graphics are far from what you’d call state of the art, the performance was disappointing, to say the least. Even in a 1024×768 window, it didn’t run great. I even paid the $5 fee to sub for a month to see if it got better fullscreen (there’s logic for ya). It didn’t. So… where’s all the horsepower under my hood (so to speak) going? We’ve got flat textures, uber-block models and poor animations. Surely it should run better than this?! Sorry to tell you this but it doesn’t.

 

The Good

 

Fun. So if you just read the Performance and The Bad sections, you’d probably think I hated this game. You’d think that I was saying it was another crap MMO cashing in on a license. Half of that statement is true. The part about cashing in on a license. But it isn’t a crap MMO. Not by a long shot. I was all set to hate this game. Not that I wanted to, but my initial impressions with the performance issues were bad ones. I was ready to give up and write a scathing overview slinging around words like ‘shiver-me-timbers!’ and ‘Crikey!’. But … well, I kept playing. And I found that I was having fun. A lot of fun. They did some interesting things here which make this game interesting. There’s active targeting with handguns. You have to click to slash with your sword and click in rhythym to get a combo going. It’s not much but it at least feels a bit more like actual combat than just slapping at number keys. Well, you do that here too, but there’s also the clicking.

Ship combat.I mentioned this under Unique to.. but I’m saying it again because it’s just fun. You pilot your own ship around the Caribbean. You can leave the wheel while in combat and grab one of the cannons and lay into your opponents. This is awesome. If you have a crew on board with you (your party), you can have them take care of that and you can just steer and pick up the loot. I loved this part of the game. It’s easy, noisy, and entertaining.

Well-implemented questing. The quests aren’t deep. But there’s quite a few to do and they are implemented well with your radar and in game. Any quest that you’ve chosen to track shows up in two places: on your radar as an arrow that points to your destination around the outer rim, and in the game world as an enormous shaft of light that streams down from the sky. If you’re in the zone, you’ll see it. It’s well done; you’re never wondering where you’re supposed to go to kill 3 Scorpions. Just look up, swivel.. Ah there it is.

Incredibly fast download. This is likely streamed or something, I’m not sure. But the amount of time between when I clicked ‘Download’ and when I was playing was somewhere around 10 minutes. That is fantastic, and it makes trying it out just that much easier, especially when some of these trials are upwards of 9GB. (Everquest II, I’m looking at you.)

 

The Bad

 

Disney: Nothing quite says ‘kid’s game’ quite as much as a Disney-branded MMO. You can’t even shoot people… only when they’ve been transformed into zombie pirates. Seriously? Yep. You have to hold a ‘cursed coin’ to get transformed and then you’re fair game.

I’m not turned off too much by the Disney logo. If the theme interests me, I’ll give it a shot. In my opinion, I’m more likely to enjoy this than an anime-themed MMO, but that’s just me. Your mileage may vary.

Cartoony Graphics. Hand in hand with the above, the graphics are cartoony. Some people hate this, some people love it. I’m ambivalent. I’d be more enthusiastic about them if the game just ran smoother.

Community. I’m not trying to come down hard on the community that exists. I’m sure they’re great. There does seem to be a community, so that’s something, right? However, since the game was developed with a teen – or possibly younger, with supervision – audience in mind, you have to expect that you’re going to be playing with teenaged players a lot of the time. This may or may not be a bad thing, but I suspect most people are going to view it with a certain amount of apprehension no matter what.

Performance. I’ve got to say it again.. this game should perform WAY better on my rig.

 

Summary

 

As I mentioned before, I had a lot of fun with this game. I suspect it’s not on a lot of people’s radar, and that’s a shame. For what it is, it’s entertaining and most of all, different from what you might be accustomed to. I won’t likely subscribe to this, but I’m definitely going to be keeping it installed for a while.

 

Download value: [rating: 6.5] (6.5)