Pirates of the Burning Sea

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The world of massively-multiplayer games is depressingly uniform. Peruse the MMO rack of your local game emporium, and all you'll see is box after box of tired old pseudo-Tolkien prattle, with the odd sci-fi space epic thrown in for good measure. And given that we're pretty much obliged to play them all, we've reached the point where if we have to kill another goblin or collect another rat skull, we're going to collectively hurl ourselves into Yahoo!'s Crack of Doom (tm).

Which is the main reason we like Pirates of the Burning Sea so much. There's nary an elf, mage, or hey-nonny-nonny to be seen. Instead, Pirates takes place in an idealized, Errol Flynn version of the 1720s Caribbean, and boy, does it make the most of it. We challenge any new player, upon logging into the game for the first time, not to head for the chat box and start rolling out the pirate talk cliches. It looks the part, it definitely sounds the part, and the atmosphere is laid on so thick you can practically smell the heady mix of rum and tobacco oozing out of your monitor.

Setting Pirates in its proper place in the incestuous family tree of video games is tricky, but it's rather like a cross between the all-too-familiar melee combat of World of Warcraft, the outstanding economic system from niche space MMO Eve Online, and the ship-to-ship combat from Sid Meier's Pirates. If you've never played any of those, don't worry: the game eases you into its more intricate mechanics with well-conceived tutorial missions.

As you start the game, you're shoved into the cut-and-thrust world of the Spanish Main already a captain. Spared the worries of recruiting a crew and buying your first ship, you're set up with a basic vessel and the patronage of British, French, or Spanish monarchs. If those don't appeal, you can opt to freelance by joining a kind of pirate coalition.

From there, you're free to roam the open sea to your heart's content. You'll spot many other ships, both player-run and computer-controlled. Although there are safe zones where you can't be attacked by other players, the Spanish Main is a dangerous place. Venture beyond those zones and you're fair game for players of opposing nations; and yes, if you're beaten you run the risk of losing your ship and belongings.

Appropriately, ship-to-ship combat is one of the areas where Pirates really shows its mettle. Successful captains have to balance all kinds of factors: wind speed and direction, armor levels, hull strength, different shot types, and more special abilities than you can shake a mast at. Practice enough and you can take down larger vessels, especially if you have a couple of co-conspirators - and if you can get in close enough, you can attempt to grapple and board the ship.

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