If you are into point and click adventures or pirate lore in general than Paradox Interactive has you covered with their latest release Pirates of the Black Cove. In this title you play as a sailor on a British vessel that just mutinied from its previous captain. It is now up to you to lead your crew to riches and glory while avoiding the British who want their ship and crew back. You can accomplish this goal by going on quests, battling rival vessels and establishing a pirate strong hold, all in a days work for a pirate captain.
In Pirates of the Black Cove there are two sections of the game, sailing and land exploring. The sailing has a similar look and feel to Sid Meier’s Pirates but for those not familiar with that title, you control a ship and you view it in a 3rd person perspective. You control the ships navigation and weapons and you manually steer the ship to wherever you want to go. There is no interface map pointer or GPS function so you will be switching between the map and sailing quite a bit though this was addressed in the patches released just after launch. While you are sailing you will encounter a number of items and collectibles which have little weight in the story. The only important collectible you’ll come across are the blueprints which give you access to new weapons and ships.
Let’s start out with the sailing mechanics in general. In the game it really doesn’t matter what kind of ship you have. All ships look different but when you break it down you can find success no matter what size your ship is. The reason for
that is because the battle system is extremely easy and larger ships go down rather easily by just circling them and firing. There is no lock on mechanic in the game so you nor your enemies are accurate so you will find yourself shooting a lot just to get your bearings. I really did not like the combat system and it made sea battles not much fun. It was also difficult to tell which ships belonged to which faction. Ships in the game are identified by a thin banner on the top of the mast. It gets difficult to see who the ship belongs to unless you get right next to the ship. At that point you may or may not have wasted a fair amount of time getting to the ship just to identify it. It would have been nice to have a better identification system so you know who you are attacking or chasing.
Unfortunately land exploring isn’t much better. There is a lot of time wasted walking around and doing nothing. Enemies 
are far and few between and even when you do encounter them, they are dispatched rather quickly. Especially when you mix ranged fighters in your crew, you won’t find anyone particularly challenging. Again most of the issues in this game include combat deficiencies. Combat aside, travelling takes a very long time and even though there are items that will bring you back to port, once you are inside the port you have to spend a lot of time walking to your destination. Even quests themselves involves large amounts of travel time because you will have to sail to wherever the game wants you to go, dock and move your crew to the quest, accomplish the goals and walk all the way back to your boat and use the item to get back to the port you want to get to. I would have much prefered to see a system where you can either fast travel or warp between way points. It wouldn’t be uncommon to spend 5 minutes in walking and during that time there is no action at all. This mechanic alone almost made the game unplayable for me.
It is a real shame that this game has so much character underneath the surface yet it has such a difficult time of showing everyone the game that it had the potential to be. The whimsical pirate motif is seen throughout the game and is done in a way that isn’t annoying yet it manages to pull you in and makes you think you are in a pirate cartoon so to speak. The characters themselves have a nice flair to them and the game itself looks great. The textures look nicely rendered and you get the feel like you are sailing on an old pirate map with whales and dolphins swimming alongside your ship. Unfortunately the game mechanics get in the way of the atmosphere that the game was trying to create with its sense of style. These mechanics are bad enough that until the game is patched some more I can not recommend this game for anyone.
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