The emphasis on the management stuff will be a surprise to many, and we suspect it will put off more than it attracts. You’ll be tempted to destroy them all for making you go through the previous five minutes. Stomach these to the end and you have a choice: destroy everything for a boost to your ship’s health take the resources and crew to the nearest port or enlist the survivors into your crew. There are attack and defend buttons, and your poorly animated captain will judder about the ship and aim splashy attacks at other poorly animated characters. Once the opposing ship is scuttled, you can get close enough to hop on board and participate in excruciatingly shonky third-person combat. They are, hands down, the best parts of Under the Jolly Roger.īut then you have to endure the boarding sections. These bits are generally engaging and intense, as long as the ship doesn’t get away and force you to chase after them, wind currents and all. You dance around your opponent, manually firing broadsides of cannonballs, bolas, buckshot and any other ammo that you brought from port, trying to keep your opponent in sight for long enough that your crew automatically fires salvos themselves. The camera zooms in, and you’re in the ‘squint and it’s Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag’ mode. These occur while manually steering your ship, or as random encounters when on auto-pilot. It makes better choices in the ship-to-ship combat. This is how you will be playing 90% of Under the Jolly Roger, so you may as well start now. Now, DON’T travel there manually – set a course via the world map and let the ship take you there automatically. Grab some quests from the Academy, and note the red markers on your world map that show you their destination. A note to those starting: leave the resource management for now, it’s not important. What Under the Jolly Roger chooses to do is shuffle you out of its Academy as soon as it possibly can, and watch and point as you splash around in its waters. Most importantly, there are actually ways to get enjoyment out of the game and become good at it, but Under the Jolly Roger stubbornly refuses to stick them out front. It’s got plenty of different ways to play, too, with your view shifting from cities to boat management, seafaring, sea combat, third-person combat and exploration on land.
Unfortunately, it’s not a pirate sim that should be tutorial-light, since it has a hold full of things you can tweak and optimise, from the ship to the crew to you, the captain. Under the Jolly Roger is tutorial-light, shall we say.
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