Tortuga: Two Treasures Review

This review is by JasonX

Wolf wasn't able to get his paws onto this one, due to being immersed in Runaway: Dream of the Turtle, so he gave it to me. And well, compared to his preview my review might seem a whole lot harsher.

You might remember that Wolf ran a preview of Ascaron's Tortuga: Two Treasures, well, recently I got some quality time in with a retail copy of the game and here are my thoughts:

What seemed to start off fairly well as a premise, pirates, Henry (Blackbeard) Morgan and so on is quickly catapulted into a fairly blatant copy of several popular media and games. It borrows heavily from Sid Meier and seems to also borrow from an old PS2 game Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat.

It has a Jack Sparrow-esque character complete with bandana and almost girly walk called Hawk (or is that Sparrow Hawk? Ed). Hawk has a connection to the governor's daughter, to a voodoo priestess (PotC 2 at all anyone?) and reminds me of Han Solo most of the time since he's fond of saying things like 'Princess' though I can't blame the developers for trying.

It's generic and pretty formulaic; the plot tends to tango around a load. You lose yourself more often than not. I wasn't impressed by the lack of any kind of start sequence to set the mood or introduce the story. I had more fun to be honest in the Pirates of the Caribbean game that was released originally, a copy of Sea Dogs 2 if my addled brain serves me in some kind of way.

Whilst Wolf tends to look at things in a nicer light, than me, I'm brutally honest if I don't like something. He will look for the good as well as the bad, but if something really gets on my nerves and puts me off a game then I'm going to rant about it. So here goes.

I had some problems with the way the actors delivered their lines in the cut-scenes and the voice acting, it seemed to me as though they were sitting back and drinking tea rather than putting some effort into it. Not a good start. The story is predictable, that's not a bad thing, but when it leaps around like a rabid tree-stoat from branch to branch, it puts you off.

Wolf could probably go on for hours about this kind of thing, but I can tell you now it didn't do a thing for me. Nor does the story impact with the game at all; you might as well have ripped the story out and just gone from click-attack to click-attack as that's all you're really doing.

There's no character building and there's no sense of accomplishment, apart from the fact you're trying to return Blackbeard's backstabbing favour three-fold to the scurvy bugger.

Land combat, boarding combat, has the same flavour. It's click-attack, click-attack all the way with some move modifiers. It's not a bad way to do it, but it doesn't really make you look like a swashbuckling hero compared to how it could have been done. There are some decent animations, but nothing really stands out from the run of the mill.

Sea combat is marginally more interesting but the addition of floating power ups and so on just reminds me of Legend of Black Kat. And LoBK was a much better game in my opinion. There are some nice options, such as trimming the sails and so forth, but you lose all of this when you see those floating power ups. Quick save the crew, but first, let us sail o'er that chest thar...for thar might be a magic cannonball inside me hearties!

The camera and some graphical glitches get in the way of battles, both on land and sea. The graphics themselves are not too bad, apart from when sometimes you get an ocean that looks like a flat mirror with little or no detail, these issues really spoil the sense of immersion.

I really can't say much more about the game because it's dreadfully generic in the face of previous titles. There's not much there that excites and draws you in, unless you're a dedicated pirate fan who must own every iteration of the genre there has ever been, you could do much better by getting an Xbox or a PS2 and grabbing LoBK because the addition of a hot female pirate captain, never harmed the game.

Not to mention that the story, gameplay and general feel of that game beats this one hands down.

You've always got a hard sail ahead of you when you put a cutlass up against the likes of Sid Meier and the other games in this genre, so sadly Two Treasures isn't quite up to par. It's not the worst game I've ever played, since it has some nice sound, some passable AI and some fairly alright dialogue. But those are the only things that separate it from plunging to the bottom of Davy Jones' Locker.