Port Royale 3 Review
Coming from the great developers of the Tropico series, Gaming minds and Kalypso media are proud to offer “Port Royale 3”. Port Royale 3 is a construction and management strategy game that will have you traveling the Caribbean in the 17th Century.
The naval power stands with Spain, England, France and the Netherlands but all are fighting for supremacy in 17th century Caribbean.
You are able to choose one of two paths, the adventurer or the trader.
As an adventurer you will gain notoriety by destroying cities, taking out ships at sea and hunting pirates that have rewards on their heads.
As a trader you will learn the ins and outs of the economy, produce food and materials and set up trade routes in order to become the riches and the strongest economical city in the Caribbean.
Personally I preferred the route of the trader. This is because it was down to me and my actions as to whether my country, Port Royale would rise or fall. I felt more involved and enjoyed the problem solving that my brain had to get to grips with (I love a thinking game).
The story itself is told with beautiful paintings and great narration. I was totally shocked to see these great works of art and listen to the strong narration and to be honest I don’t know why. You’re starting out as the bottom of the bag trader and want to prove your skills to a very pretty young lady as well as the rest of the Caribbean. Through producing materials and food, buying and selling and completing given tasks you gradually rank up. Ranking up is really about having more building options and having your name out there and that’s pretty much it. I never felt like anything changed too much when I was informed of my rank increasing and therefore felt that there was no real progression other than a new title.
I appreciate these games can be hard to come to grips with but Port Royale 3 is another story. The tutorials in Port Royale 3 are very shallow and definitely leave you frustrated and confused. At no point did I read and watch a tutorial and come out knowing what to do. This did annoy me at first but eventually, after a lot of digging and Google searches I found some help. I don’t remember any other strategy management game being this hard to understand and at one point I had to start a new campaign because I was in so much debt and had no idea how to get out of it. Yes, this is one of those games where saving every 2 minutes is a necessity if you’re to succeed.
So… Throughout your journey to become the greatest and most powerful trader of your country and the Caribbean you will have many tasks to complete. Starting off you will need to buy and sell food and materials such as corn, hemp, metals, clothing, cotton and alcohol to mention just a few and as your money starts to pile up and you become known in other countries you’re able to build farms, warehouses, and breweries which in turn allow you to gain produce for free as long as you supply the raw materials. And this is where the real money is at. Buying corn cheap and then sailing around the Caribbean trying to sell it for a profit can really drag. When you get to a new country and you want to trade etc you have to open the menu and click down the page to the item you want to buy/sell and then complete the transaction. This is a real drag after a while but there is a way out of this! Set up a convoy consisting of 3 fully manned ships containing weapons and produce and set it on a trade route. Trade routes can be complicated to set up but they take away all of the stress of sailing yourself, leaving the harder and more urgent tasks with your full attention.
When I say that setting up trade routes can be complicated what I should have said was “setting up trade routes can feel impossible”. It took me a long time to manage to set up a basic trade route and still now, after many hours of gameplay I still cannot work out how to set up a route where my ships would collect specific produce and take it to a warehouse where it could be used to produce more goods. This is obviously very annoying at times and ruined my experience at times.
Watching a ship sail from one place to another is tedious at best, so the option to speed up this process with the LB button is a god send. LB has got to be one of the most used button on my controller now because of Port Royale 3. Yes, sometimes you don’t want the game to go fast because there are times where you’re trying to complete a given task within its allotted time but, there are other times (the majority) where you can’t push LB hard enough!
Whilst out at sea you will at times find treasure which you can collect, shipwrecked people and then there are the pirates. Bumping into pirates sounds like it could be fun, right? Wrong! You can choose to fight pirates manually or let the AI take over but no matter what you choose, you will more than likely lose. I had 3 galleons filled with men and weapons and still I was getting wasted by these idiots at sea and had no idea why. Again I cannot stress enough that this is where saving often comes in handy!
Port Royale 3 does offer multiplayer so setting up trade routes with friends could be a blast especially if one of you knows what you’re doing, but if you don’t, you wont last 5 minutes.
I don’t want you to feel that I didn’t like Port Royale 3 because of its complexities etc because that isn’t the case, in fact I really like it and can’t wait to play it for many hours more. Port Royale 3 is one of them games that you can just chill out with alone or with a friend and conversations aren’t interrupted by someone spawn killing you etc but you have to know what you’re doing. I am a huge fan of strategy management games and will learn all I need to learn so that the full potential of the game comes to the front of my mind. I will be great at this game and I will love it! You should also try the game especially if you’re a fan, just bare in mind there is a HUGE learning curve.
7/10
Review By Wicket2961
