Port Royale 2 review

The setting of Port Royale 2 is the Caribbean in the 16th and 17th century in the time of expansion, sea commerce, pirates and the occasional skirmish between the English, French, Spanish and Dutch colonies.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a trading enterprise in a game best described as a trade simulation game by Ascaron Entertainment; the developer of Sacred.

Walking the plank

Those that have tried the original Port Royale will be familiar with the basics but PR2 comes with improvements. The main difference is that it’s much more accessible due to the eight tutorial scenarios which take you through the whole range of the game.

The tutorials are no pushovers so it would be more fitting to call them part tutorials, part scenarios since they require some time and effort to finish plus they don’t always go into detail for the new users. For example at one place you have to find a village named Providence and since the villages are unmarked on the map until you approach them, I had to get my trusty The Times Atlas of the World to find it or be forced to sail around searching for weeks. (well, game time at least).

The actual game is the free-play mode which is where you create your very own trade empire by any means necessary. The gameplay is open-ended, you decide how to play and what methods to use and there is no set ending.

You can play a Spanish pirate attacking merchant ships and towns or you can be a popular French trader creating alliances and building houses in various towns. Traders don’t have to be friendly either, you can create monopolies, buying up rare stock of materials so you can sell them later at a blown up price if you so choose. The possibilities are endless.

Ship ahoy

PR2 is all about the green and you basically build up your wealth by benefiting from supply and demand, monitoring what the villages need so you can sell to them at a higher price and what they manufacture so you can buy products cheaper.

This means that there is a lot of sailing between the sixty towns in the game and extensive trading of materials such as wood, cloth, hemp, corn, cotton, sugar and so on. Some of these are raw materials and some of these are finished products and to be master the game you have to make your own products at some point.

An example of this would be getting a building permit in a town, deciding on the spot to build the factory (let’s say a clothes factory) and building a residential area for the workers (who may have to be shipped in if there was a lack of workers in the town). Then you would either buy the raw materials, in this case cotton, from someone else or set up a factory for that also. After all this, you can start to make money buy selling the clothes to villages that need them.

Ships are of course an integral part of the game and you start out with one but can soon buy more ships and create convoys, even many convoys.

At first you sail the ships manually between towns to trade, but as soon as you get your captain some experience he can follow a predetermined ship route and do the trades himself thus saving you from some micromanaging (although that is a fun part). There are also other gameplay aspects like getting missions from governors which can involve tracking down pirates and destroying their ships or collecting pieces of a treasure map.

En guarde!

The in-game views are a few; you have the view of the villages themselves (which add up to 60) where you can communicate with the locals for example stopping by the inn to gamble or to hire a captain for your convoy, set up a feast to boost your popularity at the market or stop at the church to get your crew blessed and lift their morale.

Then there's the sea chart which is your game world; the Caribbean Sea and where you probably spend most your time sailing from port to port and attacking evil pirates (or not, if you’re an evil pirate yourself).

At times you have to participate in battles which come off as awkward compared to the fluidity of the rest of the game. In these sea battles you steer your ship attempting to outmanoeuvre your opponent and fire your cannons at the appropriate time. I's somewhat sluggish and also difficult to master and can be very unforgiving. A random pirate attack can easily destroy your whole convoy. The sword fights after you board a ship are no better, just simple click fests. Thankfully the fighting parts are a minor part of the game.

X marks the spot

The graphics are actually quite pleasing and stylish and you enjoy seeing the little details in the landscape both in the villages and on the sea charts. They may not please the perfectionists who compare them to state-of-the-art games which are dependant on their graphic quality but the overall graphic design is very fitting for this type of game and captures the richness of colour in the Caribbean.

The musical score has a grand cinematic feel to it and the ambient cacophony of background sounds is well done; the chatter of the villagers, church bells ringing, the sound of crickets, seagulls and roosters and the wind when you are sailing.

PR2 is a niche game which perhaps won’t appeal to the generic PC gamer but certainly has a place on the market despite competition from the upcoming Sid Meyer’s Pirates! Overall it is a very well designed game despite the so-so battle system. It runs smoothly on most systems and is seemingly bug-free. For the fans of the genre this comes highly recommended but also for anyone due to its fun gameplay and ease of use.