Tortuga - Two Treasures review (PC)

Tortuga - Two Treasures is a pirate game cashing in on the current craze for all things pirate started by the Pirates of the Caribbean films. The premise of the pirate game is pretty straightforward, mix land based sword fighting with sea based swashbuckling and throw in some missions and structure. Games like Sid Meiers Pirates and the classic Monkey Island games. All in all, it's quite a sparse genre so there should be plenty of room for some more entrants and particularly for some innovation.

Around the Campfire

The story of Tortuga two treasures sees you cast as Thomas “Hawk” Blythe, one of Blackbeard's Lieutenants. The story is entirely linear, so no going off on your own. The story is quite meandering and un-focussed which makes it quite difficult to work out what you're real aim is. Some of the missions are effectively side-missions like retrieve a stolen ship so you can increase your crew.

That sort of thing could easily fit into a non-linear mission version. Sadly, Tortuga walks you through all of the missions setting out the order you need to do everything. These missions are a variety of land and sea missions usually with the sea missions being a precursor to the land missions.

Pirates off the starboard bow

The first thing you'll notice on installing Tortuga is the bloat in the installation. Not content with installing the game and DirectX you also have to install the PhysX engine from AGEIA. Presumably this is intended to make the in game physics more realistic but we'll come to that later. When you start up the game you're presented with the obligatory cinematic, pre-rendered cut-scenes. Incidentally, why is this an obligatory feature of games these days? They take time between scenes in the game and are, more often than not, rubbish.

Tortuga is a mixed bag with the cut scenes. The rendering and animation are okay and some of the voice acting is good. Sadly the lead character, your character, is poorly voice acted. Everything's delivered in a completely emotionless monotone from him. His voice also seems to have been recorded in a completely different room as they have strikingly different acoustics. I'm not sure if the lead character's acting is made worse because the other characters are better or if the other characters sound better because the lead is so bad.

Ships passing in the night

Once you get past the cutscenes and voice acting and into the game it all gets off to a good start. What you want from a pirate game, really, is to start off in control of a good ship with big cannons, right into the middle of a battle. That's exactly how Tortuga starts. You take control of Hawk's ship and find yourself in the middle of a heated battle. Sadly, it doesn't last too long and soon you have to board the opposing ship and fight the crew and captain. This is where it starts to become apparent that things are going wrong.

Although you have a few options for how to control the game, the land battle is best controlled with keyboard and mouse. You only really need the left mouse button for most fights since the right one blocks. There are a few special moves as you go through but you don't really need them as they can only be performed when you have enough stamina and they're pretty redundant anyway. You'll probably find that you've been hammering the left button so hard that even when you want to perform one it takes the computer a little while to catch up and do it, by which time the moment has passed.

Down into the whirlpool

What with the linear story, dodgy cut-scenes and ropey land battles, the only thing going for Tortuga is the sea battles. If only that early pleasure held out. Sadly, you quickly lose the good ship and are relegated to a slow underpowered ship to start with. You, of course, work your way back up the ship classes but by then you're probably bored of the ship battles.

The problem is that they're just not that exciting when you get down to it. You can increase and decrease your speed with the sails and that affects your manoeuvrability. You have unlimited basic cannonballs and limited supplies of more damaging projectiles like chains to damage sails and panel breakers for doing more damage to hulls. It turns into a game of going around in circles trying to get alongside the enemy and firing first. It's fun to start with but sadly gets rather repetitive.

Testing times

There's quite a few missions to get through to try and piece together what's going on here. They vary in difficulty and length as you'd expect but necessarily how you'd expect it. Some of the mission jump from easy to impossible and back to easy again. For instance, the normal soldiers in land battles are easy fodder except when you go around a corner and are faced with ten of them at a time. Then it's mashing the left mouse button as fast as possible. There are also boss characters to fight who don't put up much more of a struggle than the normal soldiers, it just takes a lot more hits to see them off.

For the sea battles, you'll sometimes find yourself fighting similar sized vessels and sometimes against a fleet of ships a couple of classes up who have the lead in speed and weaponry. Other times you'll come to rivers that have been mined with the mines placed barely a ship width apart in places requiring a stupid level of turning accuracy and making it difficult to work out where the ship sized gap is. This is entirely the wrong way to make games last longer and to make games seem more difficult.

Trim the main sail

Well, it seems that Tortuga has quite a lot riding against it with dodgy cut-scenes, fighting engines and sailing mechanics. Earlier, I mentioned installing a physics engine and it seems that this comes into play during the sea sections. The ships do move well and turn realistically. There's a sense that the ships are really moving through water. This does make it feel more realistic but also more frustrating when you're trying to turn tightly to attack another ship and this tends to detract from these sections rather than add to them. Alongside this is a rather mediocre soundtrack. The sound effects are forgettable and the in game music is also forgettable and generic.

That's probably the best way to describe Tortuga really. It's generic Pirate fare with caricature characters and plots derived from any Pirate film you care to mention. There's little in the way of innovation in this game although there's some effort at it. The water game starts out as a good idea but once you're reduced to the basic ships, it starts to get a bit boring. Some of the missions show good concepts but they're too linear and many of the levels have rather boring implementations. It's a brave effort all-in-all, and this type of game deserves some more titles. Tortuga isn't one that I can recommend however, it's fun for a few minutes but quickly goes down the plug-hole.