Pirates of Black Cove Preview
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This is a remarkably fully featured game. Along with exploration on the main campaign map, there's light management options in the form of building up your various fortresses with key buildings, finding blue-prints to deck out your ship, and then of course the basic questing elements. A first for Nitro, this game actually has land combat, which has a very old school RTS feel. Quests that involve you going on land are usually too difficult for you to do by yourself, so you need to hire crew and soldiers to help you. Depending on which faction you get them from will define their abilities and attributes, and you simple select and click to move and attack. Some units, and your avatar, will have abilities that can help them as well.Everything was sounding pretty good until that final paragraph.
Nitro's experience with naval combat really does show though. Whilst it's a completely different experience in this game - there's no separate battle map or anything, it's still one of the better portions of the game. There's a real arcade feel to it, it's well made, it can be challenging if there's more than one enemy... as interesting as the land combat is, it seems a little clunky compared to the naval combat at the moment.
The quirkiness of the game really shines through here as well. Not only do your ships have the standard cannons, but later on in the game you can find and build special 'black market' weapons... like homing rockets. They had homing rockets back then, right? This tongue-in-cheek approach is apparent all throughout the game, from the game design, the quests... even the dialogue, which is full of double entendres. At the time of writing, there was a serious discussion about how to shoehorn the word 'blowjob' into the game, as a metaphor for getting extra wind in your sales. Yeah, the ESRB is going to love that one...
