My first impression of Age of Pirates was WOW, this game is huge! Meaning that I will be spending the next 500 hours of my life locked behind a closed door, in front of the warm radiating glow of a computer monitor. Pirates is a hard game to classify, because it spans a lot of different genre types, and it's title is somewhat underestimating. What I mean is that it's not just about pirates, in fact you don't have to have anything to do with pirates if you don't want to.

The game has several ways of playing - You have a third person view when you are on land, as a captain. Here you can go into shops, talk to people, buy and sell, fix your ship(s), etc. You can even get into fights (sword or fist). You have a map view when you are on your boat, which will allow you to quickly navigate across the oceans to get where you are trying to go. This is where you can run into "Chance Encounters" with other enemy vessels (if you have the setting on and the game mode set to normal). When you get into a chance encounter, it goes back to third person view, only of your boat. This mode is where you move around and fire cannons at each other. Let me tell you, when you are first starting out in this game, I suggest you make everyone your friend, cuz those guys mopped the floor with my head, not once, not twice, but six times in a row. You can always piss them off and make them your enemy later when you are stronger.

There is a storyline behind the game (I couldn't get very far in it, since the random encounters kept killing me), following the mystery of a package that you receive when you first start the game. This is where we start going cross genre - its a boating/killing game and a RPG and a Real Time Strategy all rolled into one, all very seamlessly. The RTS part comes from when you set up a colony (like the other Age of Empires, Age of Kings, etc) and get it bustling. I was very impressed with their ability to mix the genre's without being cheesy.

The graphics are OK - certainly not as complex or smooth as the hardware hungry Doom 3 or Elder Scrolls 4, but they are enough to get the idea across. They aren't distracting and they did a great job modeling the ocean, especially during a storm (which I hope to god I never see in real life). There are several sets of graphics - The third person land mode, the map mode, the third person sea mode and a colonizing mode. The graphics serve each well but aren't jaw dropping. With a game as large as this, I don't think they would have room to do jaw dropping.

The sound is great - especially doing the fighting scenes. In third person mode, when you board a boat and start the sword fighting with the boat's inhabitants, you can hear the clanking of steel on steel, and the moist thump and clunk of balde hitting flesh. It's a great experience. There doesn't appear to be a whole lot of voices (no voice acting so far as I got in the game) but there are a few people muttering around while you walk through town. The background music fits the bill - no Final Fantasy, but not ear screeching either. It's rather appropriate for the target audience.

The gameplay is fantastic, though difficult. You learn a lot as you go (such as sails get damaged quickly by storms if you don't roll them up) and that makes the experience ever changing, but there is a lot to the game. It might appear frustrating at first, but the more you build up your character through small battles, good crews and little missions, the better you become and the more addicting the game gets. Just for fun, I ran out and found a cheat code to allow me to not die during the battles (while you might think this gives you an edge up, its a very small edge in the overall game, believe me). After a while, sinking ships became a habit that was making me gainfully wealthy - the wealth you can use to buy more ships, upgrade your current ones, set up colonies, hire better crew members, etc. There is a LOT of reading to do in the beginning. There is so much to the game, it's not one where you can toss the disc in and start playing without reading some of the instructions. I do think a little bit more of a tutorial section would have made a huge difference in the game.

The biggest draw of this game to me, was hours upon hours of game time. It never gets old, and there is so much to do in it, that you won't be bored for a long time. It's not a place once sit it down - just like the chips, you can't stop with just one hour. The only problem I really had with the game was a random system crash through out it. This could be due to various reasons, but my computer is built specifically for gaming - Pentium 4 3.2 ghz chip with hyperthreading, 1 gig of fast burst crucial tech ram, Serial ATA drives, and a ATI card with 512 megs of memory (I can't remember the model but it came out earlier this year). My OS is steamlined for gaming, with none of the unnecessary windows services running, and nothing else running in memory at all. With this particular setup, the game runs fast and smooth, with no slow downs or hang ups. The random crashes aren't often enough to be too much of an inconvienance. That result isn't typical as far as I can see though - most of the time the game runs perfectly.

If you want a game you spend the rest of the year playing that is packed to the brim with fun, I recommend picking this up! It's worth every penny.