Back in 1987 the original Sid Meier’s pirates came out and become one of the first multiplatform games to emerge. In those days however, multiplatform meant the Commodore, Atari, and the IBM PC. These days, the XBOX creates excellent games – with Sid Meier’s pirates being no exception to the rule.

In the game, you play a pirate who is out for revenge against the evil Spanish nobleman who has wronged your family. The beauty behind Sid Meier’s Pirates is the open ended strategy that lets you live the life of a pirate in your own way. You can take the career of a pirate, treasure hunter, explorer, or even a trader. You’ll sail the Spanish Main, trade with other ships, engage in combat, search for buried treasure, sneak into towns, and even dance with the governor’s daughter!

Over time, your character will age, so your ultimate goal is to gather as much fame and fortune as possible before you retire. At this point, your pirate will go into the hall of fame and you can start the quest all over again. The prologue of the game will explain how your wealthy merchant family was imprisoned and how you managed to escape at a young age. Years later, it’s up to you to vanquish the evil, save your family, and get rich in the process.

When you begin the game, the first thing that you will do is create a name for yourself, as well as your specialty. You can also select a nation to align yourself with as well as a time period. After you choose these two things you’ll begin in your tiny ship in a great big sea that’s alive with activity and commerce. Here, you can choose to follow the campaign or simply take sailing into your own matters and explore.

The game of Sid Meier’s Pirates is very easy to pick up and play, yet it also contains a nice amount of strategic depth as well. There are times in the game that can be very easy, while other times it may be hard. Even if you don’t play games a lot, you’ll find this one to be easy to play yet hard to master.

When you’re out sailing the Caribbean, you can go anywhere although you are limited by two constraints. The first of the two is food. You can only carry so much food, which means that the bigger your crew is – the faster your food will disappear. Although this doesn’t sound like much of a problem at first, it becomes one quickly. You can however, pull into a friendly port and buy food or simply hijack a nearby vessel and take over its food supply.

The other constraint that you have is the morale of your crew. Your crew members will expect a fair share of the treasure when the journey has ended. If you fail to keep them happy, they’ll start to desert you very fast. As long as you keep them happy, they’ll be there whenever you need them.

Unlike the PC version of the game, the XBOX version offers some multiplayer in it as well; in the form of up to four player ships that play a lot better than was expected. This is basically a fast paced party game that will let you and your friends control a ship as you battle it out amongst yourselves. There are a limited amount of maps although in general they are well designed and create the insane type of game in which you’re trying to desperately maneuver around a tiny area while dodging the cannon fire.

You can only play the head to head mode on a single XBOX. Although the game is only XBOX live aware, the online component is limited to just downloadable content and of course the leader boards. None the less, this is still a great strategy game that will consume and endless amount of your time.

Even though the average pirate career may only last around 5 – 10 hours, the game does offer a lot of replay value, as you can play harder difficulty levels, try out different techniques, and check out the different eras of sailing. With the excellent game play, incredible pacing, and blockbuster presentation – Sid Meier’s Pirates has a lot of great things that you will surely enjoy.

- TopXboxGames.com