Sid Meier’s Pirates: Live the Life ($20) is pretty straightforward: Try to make a name for yourself in The New World to help you find your kidnapped family. The best way to get what you want in the Caribbean? Control the water ways.

The game takes you through several exciting aspects. Learning the physics of sailing will help you navigate from place to place. Aim and strategy is required to take out other ships with your cannons, relieving them of their goods and crewmen. Some savvy and a good memory will serve you well as you buy low and sell high at the merchant’s stalls in each port. A sense of rhythm is important when the governor’s daughter asks you to the ball, or when the local villain or fellow pirate draws his sword. Stealth, and quick response time are needed to escape the guards in town. Finally, storming a town’s defenses by land requires grid-based tactics.

With all these aspects to the gameplay, you’d think it would have some issues somewhere, but surprisingly, this game goes well beyond expectations. It’s all beautifully drawn and rendered, and very easy to control. It’s no feat to suspend one’s disbelief, and really get into the life of your pirate protagonist.

Even on the easiest setting, it’s still an epic game, difficult to actually complete all your objectives before your pirate gets too old to continue pirating. You simply can’t get everything done in each game. A single game comprises the entire career of your pirate, and you can stop whenever you feel like you’ve accomplished enough. You could keep going forever, but as your pirate gets older, everything he does gets progressively more difficult to accomplish (especially sword-fighting). Your pirate can’t be killed, but he can have everything won away from him, forcing him to start from scratch.

One interesting dynamic to the game is the idea that your career is a series of individual journeys. You can collect men, ships, and gold as you go, but the longer the journey runs, the harder it gets to keep your crew happy, which could lead to mutiny. The only answer is to occasionally ‘divide the booty’, which splits all the money and boats (except for your flagship) among the crew members, and forces you to take several months away from the sea, further aging your pirate. At that point, you have the choice to go back out with your flagship and a few new crew members, to increase the difficulty by one step (if you did well over the journey), or to retire the character permanently, adding his score to the leader-board. This mechanic does a good job of dividing the game-play up into manageable chunks, and helps the player set goals for himself, and rewards him with a feeling of accomplishment.

Rundown

Goals

It’s hard to describe this game as anything other than great pirate fun. It has everything from swashbuckling to ballroom dancing. The learning curve on some of the puzzles is a little steep, but it’s worth it to learn them.

Visuals

The game looks great. The different puzzles and aspects of this game offer so many places to have gone slack with the graphics that it’s almost surprising that every part of the game looks as good as it does.

Sound

The sound effects were all appropriate and unobtrusive. The music blended well into the background. As I always say: “The best soundtrack is the one that doesn’t stand out.”

Controls

With all the different aspects to this game, one might expect a bunch of complicated controls, but it was very intuitive, and easy to understand. You can play almost the entire game with just the num-pad.

Swag

Sturdy box; a thick, helpful, spiral-bound manual; and a neat map of the West Indies. No less than I’ve come to expect from Sid Meier.

Encoding

Had occasional trouble with artifacts on the screen, was always fixed by a restart of the system. Sometimes my boat would get stuck on the shoreline, and there was no way to escape, necessitating frequent saves.

Marks

I give Sid Meier’s Pirates: Live the Life 4 out of 5 Spudz.