Pirates: Duels on the High Seas

I previewed Pirates: Duels on the High Sea in early August, and the full release has now been released by Oxygen Studios, so the full Pirates franchise across WiiWare and the DS is now fully available.

The storyline hasn’t changed at all; the aim of the game is for the player to be a double agent. As a member of the British Navy, the Captain has been en tasked to set sail to find a treasure that will remove a curse set upon them by being greedy in the first place. As a double agent, none of the British Navy knows that he’s not to be attacked, and other pirates are as ruthless as ever.

The enemies haven’t evolved either: there’s still the mix of fairly easy small Navy vessels to full-blown battle ships, the occasional pirate and some other famous nautical beings such as the Kraken and Blackbeard. Fortunately, the option of varied difficulty levels has remained, and therefore, the game can be enjoyed in all three settings: Easy, Normal and Hard. These settings still have a direct impact on the size, condition and ability of the vessel available, not to mention the rest of the enemies and booty around as well.

The use of the touch screen again hasn’t really changed. There are various options on the touch screen to give a temporary boost to either the ship's speed, rebuilding ability, offence and cartography ability. The touch screen is a little more sensitive now and it makes just one tap of the stylus turn on the ability -- an improvement from before where it was a little fussy and wouldn’t always work.

Along with the “booster” options, the touch screen also contains a map of where the vessel is able to go, and it also has the “fog of war” on as well, so there’s only a limited distance that the ships are able to see. There’s no interactivity between the stylus and the map, and it’s entirely there for information purposes, which is a shame, as it would be good to see it take that level of cartography one step further and allow notes to be written on the map such as with Phantom Hourglass or Etrian Odyssey.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be an online mode via the Nintendo WiFi network. There’s a local network, which only requires one game cartridge to battle against friends, which in itself is very enjoyable. Unfortunately, this game needs to have the online Nintendo WiFi ability to make it more enjoyable, as the multiplayer modes (all 53 of them) are great, but would be enhanced by playing against anonymous people online.

The unique and intuitive control style has also been kept for the full release. The player is able to control their pirate ship by using the L and R shoulder buttons on the DS to push the ship either forward or backward and the D-Pad is used as a way of turning the ship left or right. This control system is a little awkward to get used to at first; however, after the first few minutes of playing Pirates: Duels on the High Sea, it becomes very natural. Even though the controls are very natural, the actual gameplay itself becomes a little stale after the first hour or so. With the same sort of enemies and maze like levels, Pirates really suffers from repetitive level design.

Luckily, one of the most unique and interesting pieces of the game has maintained it’s brilliance from the preview cartridge, and that’s the incredible artwork. Throughout all of the game the artwork for the cut-scenes is absolutely amazing, and could easily be mistaken for artwork straight from a graphic novel or comic book.

Final Verdict - 6/10
The lack of online multiplayer really brings the score down for Pirates: Duels on the High Sea. With the repetitive gameplay in the singleplayer mode, an online multiplayer mode would really have made Pirates much more fun.