Ascaron's pirate-themed attempt to branch out into the action realm needed a lot more time in drydock.
I've never met the guys from Ascaron Entertainment, but when I picture them in my head, they're all wearing eye patches and carrying parrots on their shoulders. That's because Ascaron's managed to create a mini-niche as pirates - err -- "free traders," through well-regarded games like the Patrician series and the pirate-themed Port Royale games. In recent days, Ascaron has tried to branch out from the hard-core strategy game world with fare like DarkStar One. That brings us to Tortuga: Two Treasures, a pirate-flavored action title that that barely keeps its head above water.
Tortuga: Two Treasures is the story of Captain Thomas "Hawk" Blythe, an 18th century pirate who (along with his girlfriend, a voodoo priestess named Sangua) sails under the flag of legendary pirate Edward "Blackbeard" Teach. When Hawk and Sangua embark on a quest for the legendary treasure of Henry Morgan, things rapidly go from bad to worse as Hawk endures the betrayal of his commander, the wrath of the British Navy, the attention of a lovely Governor's daughter with a ferocious temper and an ancient curse that involves a ghost ship chasing his ship to steal away the souls of his crew.
It's this storyline and the game's atmosphere that mark the title's greatest strength. Ascaron's spent a lot of virtual time in the 18th century while creating their previous games and their experience really shows in Tortuga: Two Treasures. The story and graphics were obviously heavily influenced by Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movies (Hawk even bears a resemblance to Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow), but Tortuga manages to carve out its own place simply by throwing every venerable pirate movie trope they could find into the mix. Voodoo, zombies, flashing cutlasses, single-shot pistols, flaming rum, ships on fire, cursed treasures, stolen ships-of-the-line, ghost vessels, hidden maps and dueling femme fatales, they're all in here. If there's a pirate-movie clich� that Ascaron missed, it certainly wasn't from lack of trying.
The atmosphere is ably supported through good voice-work and music. While not the best voice-overs I've ever heard in a videogame, the voice talent for Hawk, Sangua, and Blackbeard all do excellent jobs reciting dialogue that is admittedly over the top. The game even manages to not butcher a New Orleans-style Voodoo priestess accent, something I've seen done on numerous occasions. Like the story itself, the music is reminiscent of the Disney films but is nonetheless an appealing and sprightly collection of hornpipe and accordion-heavy jigs and reels punctuated by more bombastic brass pieces during ship combat.
At first glance, Tortuga is graphically impressive. The game's ships are remarkably detailed with beautifully animated sails that the player can raise and lower and billow in the breeze. Sunsets and skies are breathtaking. Fire effects are cool and the crunching wood sounds during the destruction and sinking of an enemy vessel is very satisfying. There are even little crew members walking around on deck and during combat they can actually be blown into the water where they'll struggle until they're rescued or a cute little shark leaps out of the water and eats them, leaving only a red stain. The land graphics aren't quite up to the level of the naval stuff, but they're certainly attractive enough.
It isn't until one takes the helm of their first vessel that the game begins to break down, although it takes some time to realize this. Naval combat isn't terribly complicated and I genuinely had a good time for a while trying to get into the perfect position to blast enemies with a broadside. The game's ship combat has been sped up a lot when compared to its historical inspiration with impossibly agile ships bobbing and weaving around each other. As the game moves on, however, all the game's naval combat missions start to take on a depressing sameness. The game's AI isn't terribly smart and tends to run over reefs a lot. There are a few different types of ammunition that can be fired for different effects, but in practice all a player has to do is stock up on hull repair kits to be assured of victory.
Once in a while a so-called "stealth" mission will come up in which Hawk must navigate a tiny one-man skiff through narrow mine-infested waters or sneak by an enemy vessel. Unfortunately, decent stealth missions require the possibility of actually sneaking past somebody. In my experience, enemy ships have a circle of awareness around them that's unaffected by things like light and shadow. Cross over an arbitrary line and you're spotted which kind of takes all the fun out of sneaking around.
More problematic is the game's land-based combat. While I understand the difficulty in creating a decent sword-fighting system, the, Tortuga is button-mashing at its worst -- and not even multiple buttons! I went through the entire game doing nothing but spamming "attack" and occasionally using a healing potion or Voodoo sleeping powder, Movement control is atrocious and it's almost impossible to retreat because the player's attack direction is controlled by the camera facing. Soldiers also seem to have the same circle of enemy awareness as ships. Running away is almost completely useless in this game since you're guaranteed to add more enemies than you can handle.
Here's the weird thing, though -- the lousy sword fighting system isn't the game's worst sin. One of the reasons that pirates are so appealing is because they represent the fantasy of freedom from rules and strictures. A pirate vessel is a license to travel where you will and live life on your own terms. Why then would anyone choose to create a pirate game whose very structure is a straitjacket? Gameplay in Tortuga consists of simply finishing one pre-set mission after another in order to get to the next plot-point. You can sail wherever you want to go during a mission, but that's not going to accomplish anything. There are no towns to land in, no NPCs to talk to, no secrets to discover, no trade to engage in and until you sink the two frigates (or finish whatever the mission goal is) that the mission designers have designated, you're not going anywhere buccaneer. The only reason to pick up cargo from destroyed vessels at all is to use the gold in a between-mission "trade" store where you can buy healing potions, hull patches, ammo and a few other things that aren't very useful.
In the end Tortuga: Two Treasures isn't completely without value, but what makes it so disappointing is that it's from Ascaron. These are the developers who cut their teeth making trading games like Port Royale 2 and Patrician that defined the player's ability to carve their own destiny. For it to completely jettison everything that made it an interesting development house for a mediocre action-title-on-rails is just a shame.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Yargh! It be pirate software, matey!
Abandoning creativity and originality faster than Blackbeard apparently abandoned moral decency, Tortuga—Two Treasures instead wallows unapologetically in virtually every hackneyed pirate-ism to ever walk a gangplank. All the swordplay, all the gravely voiced "Avasts," all the looting and the pillaging and the rum-soaked yet somehow romanticized no-goodniks, all the peg legs and the ghostly references and the voodoo and the cannon battles. Even the main character, one Thomas "Hawk" Blythe, wears and bears all the typical swashbuckling-rapscallion-with-an-underlying-heart-of-gold traits and garb that have adorned most every pirate hero throughout the ages. That the action-adventure game around these oh-so-stereotypical trappings is structured to leave very little room for actual adventure outside the hand-holding linear storyboard somehow doesn't seem surprising.
As with any adventure game, Tortuga features a plotline that's supposed to keep players pushing ever forward and onward to eventual conquest. Problem is, the nature of that plot remains a bit of a mystery throughout. If there's an all-encompassing goal to be found anywhere here, it's muddled amongst a ton of triviality that continually sidetracks any momentum that may have previously been built.
In fact, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that developer Ascaron Entertainment (also responsible for the much classier Dark Star One) appears to have added several seemingly disconnected after-the-fact missions here and there just to give the player more stuff to do on his way to the conclusion. And, ultimately, that's actually a good thing given the context, because the Tortuga script is otherwise so funneled and so structured—and so short—that you need all the play time you can get.
In Tortuga, there is no coloring outside the lines. Like a book, the game takes you along the route it charts, unceremoniously stopping you if you sail a ship or walk the hero outside the mildly confining and invisible physical boundaries, and forcing you to adhere strictly to the each new objective. Missions are generally quite limited—some less than a few minutes—and each is prefaced with a non-interactive FMV scene wherein the voice acting takes a backseat to the written script.
The key is in the visual details. Each ship—and there are an impressive variety of circa-1830 nautical vessels on display—is a beautiful little recreation that truly seems to be built of individual planks, billowing sails, and hundreds or thousands of feet of rigging. The sails are particularly cool—casting real time shadows across the deck and the other sails, fluttering about in the wind, and ready to be lowered or raised whenever you feel so inclined. A single button press raises some of the sails, and additional button presses raise more, eventually getting the ship to top speed.
On the decks, little seamen and seawomen scurry about hither and thither like they really have some job to do and some place to get to. Granted, their scurrying never really takes them anywhere, and their actions don't change whether their ship is under fine or merely calmly sailing from one port to another. Moreover, they won't climb the rigging, perch themselves in the crowsnest, or even sit behind a cannon when that cannon is fired. However, they do fly through the air nicely when the nearby vicinity is blown asunder, only to land in the translucent water as potential shark bait. And the sharks do come when humans are bobbing in the water, ready to gulp down those you don't rescue. When several crewmen are chomped at once, the resulting blood smear can grow quite large.
Indeed, the translucency of the water is a welcome perk. Through it, you can see reefs and high points in the ocean bottom that can damage a ship—an important facet considering you'll occasionally need to use these reefs as weapons to inflict harm upon the keels and rudders of trailing enemy vessels. The clarity of the water is so great in fact that you can usually view every spooky line of even previously sunken ships under the waves.
Spookier still are Tortuga's obligatory ghost ships. All clad in back and sporting tattered sails that drag in the wind, ghost ships are the seemingly unstoppable enemy from beyond the grave that literally sucks the souls out of your crewmen. A few too many sucked souls, and it's game over. You'll know when a ghost ship approaches because the music grows dark and horribly sinister and you'll see the accompanying gray-black fog bank. The first few times you encounter one of these schooners from hell, the effect is really quite chilling.
But you'll spend most of your time at sea battling human enemies. Sometimes it'll be ship-to-ship, sometimes your boat is pitted against an entire fleet, and still other times you'll be asked to pilot your speedy and maneuverable but frighteningly small skiff against whatever the game throws at you.
The most important weapon at your disposal is usually your own craftiness. For instance, by appearing as if you're fleeing, you can drag your rivals over hull-damaging reefs or into collisions with one of the many explosive barrels than float about like seaweed.
Even when you're duking it out mano-a-mano, you need to keep you wits. Your side-mounted cannons won't even hit the intended target unless you line yourself up broadside. Of course, your opponent is trying to do the same thing, so you really need to be careful that he doesn't take direct aim at you at the same time. Moreover, though regular cannonballs are inexhaustible, the most effective weapons—which are purchased via trading the gold you've recovered—are not. Thusly, you need to monitor your supply of explosive barrels and "plate breakers." One of the niftiest weapons isn't a weapon at all—it's giant octopus bait. Drop a little of this in the water, and you'll soon see enormous tentacles rising out of the water, surrounding the closest foe and keeping him helplessly lodged in one spot until you move in for the kill. Nice.
Perhaps even more irritating is the physics engine. If you've ever watched one of today's "tall ships" in action, you know how much work is involved and how much time it takes just to turn one of these babies around. Yet here, you can do a full 180, propel yourself from a standing start to top speed, or come to a complete stop with almost the same efficiency and proficiency of a jet-ski. And you can forget about waves or swells or wind speed or wind direction influencing anything, because none of it matters.
Tortuga's second element takes you completely away from the sea and plunks you instead on land, walking about and talking with various characters but mostly gutting virtually everyone you see. You'll find most of the cutscenes here, and you'll occasionally need to do something interesting that doesn't involve drawing your sword, such as garnering information or picking up a treasure chest and the power-ups it harbors. But it's mostly a ridiculously repetitive hack and slash fest.
The Tortuga environments and backdrops, for the most part, look pretty enough. At sea, some of the best moments are during the early evening, when the orange-hued clouds and landmasses look nothing short of dazzling. On land, the towns and villages you visit are satisfactorily ornate in their construction. Granted, you can't open doors or shatter windows or really have any sort of impact or interaction with the scenery, but that's the life of a bargain basement pirate.
As we alluded earlier, the voice acting throughout the many cutscenes is verging on criminally bad. The script is well-written enough, but there's very little enthusiasm in its delivery. The music is symphonic—as it should be—and it does tend to rise and fall along with the current level of drama. Ascaron clearly believes in the human voice as a key sound effect, and you'll hear lots of assorted bits of conversation, commands, and shrieks of terror throughout. And yes, with the exception of foppish Brit soldiers, almost everyone sounds like a scurvy dog.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved