Sea Legends

One of the best spiritual successors to Sid Meier's classic Pirates! that unfortunately few knew about, Russian developer Mir Dialogue has painstakingly reproduced in Sea Legends almost all the elements that made Pirates! so popular, and injected just enough new material to qualify it as a unique experience.

For those (few) who are unfamiliar with Pirates!, here's the beef from GameSpot review: "...as would-be buccaneer, you must learn the arts of swordsmanship, warfare, and trading to survive the cutthroat waters of the Caribbean Sea. Starting with a small ship and a few stalwart men, you will amass a fortune through a combination of trade, bounty hunting, and outright thievery on the high seas. Once your fledgling fleet grows in size, you can can even attempt to capture entire colonies to your name. Sea Legends takes the action/strategy gameplay of Pirates! a step further by introducing a new element?a scripted role-playing adventure replete with damsels in distress and traitorous governors. While players have the option of totally disregarding the plot that unfolds around them, the entertaining storyline inserts a bit of intrigue and order to an otherwise unstructured game.

Since Sea Legends is a game about piracy, the excellent ship-to-ship combat engine deserves special mention. While Pirates! relied on a simplified overhead representation of combat, Sea Legends offers a first person, 3-D approach. Using the same voxel space technology found in games like Comanche, Mir Dialogue very convincingly reproduces the look and feel of 17th century sea warfare. The attention to detail is impressive, to say the least?decks pitch and sway, cannonballs whiz past your head, and lightning flashes through the sky. In this chaotic environment, players must navigate the ship, aim and fire the cannons, and issue commands to other ships in the fleet. To call the combat in Sea Legends exciting would be a gross understatement. My only major gripe with the game lies in the documentation?or rather, the lack of it-- it omits information that is vital to successful completion of the game (such as staying in Taverns to replenish hit points). In conclusion, Sea Legends takes all the elements that made Pirates! a classic, and adds a healthy dose of action and intrigue to make a great game even better." A must-have!

Review By HOTUD