Pirates of Black Cove Game Guide

Pirates of Black Cove's colorful vibe is apparent right off the bat. Jokes like this: "Two pirates on a ship. The game tells you there are 1,000 of these jokes to collect. Pirates of Black Cove is full of character. The three swashbuckling factions send you off on various missions, most of which involve sailing the sea and firing your cannons at enemy ships, or cruising to various isles and engaging meanies on land. Either way, what seems at first like simple fun turns sour when you realize just how easy and glitchy both aspects of the game are. Take, for example, the typical land mission. Such missions take the guise of a real-time strategy game. You recruit different types of units back at the faction bases--swordsmen, marksmen, and so on--and then assign them to a hero unit. What starts as a small crowd of units eventually becomes a large one. But whether you're in the game's first hour or the 10th, battle is always the same: select all of your units and click on enemies until they die. It doesn't matter which units you recruit back at base. It doesn't matter whether you activate a hero unit's special power. To win, you select all of your swaggering swashbucklers and click.

You can quicktravel back to pirate bases, but getting to mission objectives involves sailing your ship across oceanic expanses with little to break up the monotony. It's nice that you can improve your ships with new equipment (Sail faster! The seafaring suffers from sloppy execution, too. This issue can be downright hysterical in escort missions involving multiple ships banging against each other and getting caught between landmasses. The problem?