Version tested: Xbox 360
Age of Booty
- Developer: Certain Affinity Inc.
- Publisher: Capcom
- Cost: 800 Microsoft Points
- In Real Money: GBP 6.80 / EUR 9.60
- Release Date: 15th October
After the rather soggy Pirates: The Key of Dreams on WiiWare, and with the loosely related Pirates vs Ninjas Dodgeball doing bad things to my brain, I wasn't in a particularly receptive mood for yet more downloadable buccaneering seamanship. The fact that Age of Booty managed to thaw my frosty pirate prejudice, even slightly, is clearly a victory of sorts.
For one thing, it gives me the chance to use my awesome joke about "booty" and a pirate called Arrrr Kelly. It's also a strategy game, a genre which seems to suit nautical combat better than any flat-out action approach. Played out on a map of hexagonal spaces, you direct your ship by clicking the spot you'd like it to sail to. Stop alongside an enemy vessel, a wandering merchant ship or a port and you open fire, automatically trading shots until someone sinks into the briny deep. Capturing towns in this manner is the aim of the game, with a set number needed under your control for victory. Despite looking like an old-fashioned turn-based game, it's actually all real-time, and play is very fast and arcadey.
Each town you capture starts adding resources to your stockpile, and you can also top things up by grabbing floating crates or small villages. There are only three resources to worry about - wood, gold and rum. Wood and gold can be used to fortify towns, while wood and rum are the currency for upgrading your ship's speed, armour and cannons. Defeating merchants will net you a curse. These are one-use weapons and abilities like whirlpools, bombs and invisibility. It's hardly a deep system, but it adds just enough to keep things from being too mindless.
Where the game flounders is in the balance of the gameplay. There are 21 single-player challenges - seven each for easy, medium and hard difficulty - and during these you're accompanied by AI bots. You have absolutely no control over these supposed team mates, which can be more than a little frustrating. You may be trying to take a town, while battling rival pirates, but if your other ships decide they'd rather pick up crates, there's not much you can do about it. They'll also happily spend your resources on upgrades without asking, which can be a real pain if you're working towards a specific strategy of fortification for your towns.
Age of Booty is already better than the entirely unnecessary fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
The AI enemies are a problem as well. I mean, obviously they're a problem - they wouldn't be enemies otherwise - but the game respawns destroyed ships almost immediately, at the cost of just one resource item. This means you can be battling a rival pirate, sink their ship, and be facing them again - with full health - seconds later. With such a fast turnaround, and with no way of issuing even basic orders to your team, capturing and holding towns all over the map can be a Sisyphean task (that's your recommended daily dose of Eurogamer pretension, by the way).
It's clear the game was designed primarily for multiplayer, and with fellow humans controlling the other ships on your team the experience improves considerably. You can strategise, plan pronged attacks and split your efforts between attack and defence with far more success. There's also a map editor, so you can create your own challenges.
As a single-player experience, Age of Booty is frustrating and poorly balanced. Take it online, however, and you've got something that's almost worth the 800-Point asking price.
7/10
War World
- Developer: Third Wave Games
- Publisher: Ubisoft
- Cost: 800 Microsoft Points
- In Real Money: GBP 6.80 / EUR 9.60
This third-person multiplayer shooter, originally released for the PC back in 2005, has the distinction of being one of the better looking Live Arcade titles. At least, it does if your definition of "better looking" is "lots of things that are big and shiny".
The big shiny things are battle mechs, doomed to kill each other to pieces for eternity, presumably because they live somewhere called War World. The fact that the first thing I can find to say about them is that they look nice should probably tip you off to the game's fatal weakness. Beyond making for impressive screenshots, there's not much else to recommend. Robots get lodged behind scenery - and you really have to witness a giant mech being stymied by a tiny bush to believe it - while the frame rate is jittery.
In fact, it doesn't take long for the game to unravel quite badly, even if the basic package seems reasonable enough. Your 800 Microsoft Points get you eight maps and four game modes. Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and Bomb Assault are your options for online fun, while solitary offline players get an Arcade mode made up of 100 levels filled with increasing numbers of enemy bots. It's rather bizarre, then, that all the Achievements are for completing these offline levels rather than excelling at the online multiplayer.
That's just the beginning of a fairly substantial list of peculiar design decisions though, so let's get started. For a start, there's no tutorial which means you'll be working out most of the details for yourself. The arenas are littered with items, but as none of them are labelled and the game doesn't tell you what you just picked up, you'll have to go through a lot of trial and error to work out which ammo refills which weapon.
Weapons are limited so mech the most of them. Arf.
And while we're on the subject of weapons, although the control map shows you buttons for missiles, mines and other exciting things, you can only actually use these if you choose a mech with them fitted as standard. The game doesn't tell you this either, so your first matches will probably be spent wondering why half the buttons don't work. There's no way of picking up new weapons in the field, nor can you design your own mech as in the PC version. Oh, and you have no close quarters melee attack, and a host of other basic shooter functions - such as a sniper being able to zoom their view - are absent.
So what seems like a very impressive budget-priced deathmatch swiftly reveals itself to be all surface glitter with no gameplay depth. If you're a fan of online multiplayer slaughter, then it's a safe bet that you've already got plenty of games that do the same thing as War World, and do it a lot better.
4/10
