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You play as a pirate captain, starting with a single ship in the Caribbean between 1635 and 1700; the date you select determines how difficult the game will be. You get to read about the current events involving all the major seagoing powers of the time, but unfortunately this information is presented in the tiniest of print - a characteristic carried over from the manual, which is a Reader's Digest-sized book with a minuscule typeface. Straining to read the light-black type on a gray background is painful, and it takes over 150 pages (excluding history, designer notes, and glossary) to explain what's involved in being a successful pirate. Why all the wordage? Because Cutthroats' interface - a mind-boggling array of icons on nearly every screen - isn't the least bit intuitive.
Before heading out on your first voyage, it's a good idea to head into town and recruit a few more crewmen, pick up a couple of extra cannons, and perhaps pay a visit to the governor to try to get on a good footing with him. Once that's done, it's time to set sail, but unfortunately what should be the most exciting part of any pirate game - attacking ships and pillaging towns - is where Cutthroats is least satisfying.
You can order the crewmen in the crow's nest to notify you when enemy ships approach, and when that happens, you can switch to an overhead view looking directly down on your ship. Once there, you'll eventually learn how many ships you've encountered and, if you get close enough, what flags the ships are flying and what types of vessels they are. The problem is that there's no way to jump back to the strategic map immediately after you determine you don't want an encounter - only when the sighted ships get far enough away does that option become available.
The graphics for both sea- and land-based combat are laughably bad, like what you might expect from a Sega Genesis game from six years ago. What's more disappointing is the combat interface and ship behavior. You should be able to outrun and outmaneuver a "battleship" (a term that wasn't even used in the 17th century) with your sloop. But should an unfriendly "battleship" spot you, you can pretty much count on being hunted down - even if it takes 10 or 15 minutes of real time for the enemy to finally close and engage (why isn't there an "accelerate time" feature?). There's also no display of wind direction in the battle view, so the only way to determine wind direction is by steering until you find which way you're going the fastest.
Battles are drab and boring, but at least you've got a nice variety of options: You can choose the type of shot (round, chain, grapeshot) or whether you want to fire muskets only, to grapple and board, or even ram your opponent. But these again are all represented with tiny icons called up by right mouse-clicks, and in the heat of battle you can easily get confused as you try to navigate and issue battle commands. At other times you'll see some truly strange happenings: Your ships might run aground and sink for no apparent reason, and hostile ships will get locked going round and round in circles.
Boarding enemy vessels ought to be a bloody affair, but in Cutthroats all you get for excitement is another miniature display of two guys about eight pixels tall fighting with swords, with numbers on the left and right showing how many men each side has left. Watching these events unfold is thoroughly boring, and the constant chatter of your commanders ("We'll send 'em to Davy Jones' locker!") doesn't help things one bit. There's no real reason to expect a complicated land-combat component when you've got so few men to deal with, but there's also no excuse for the pathetic character graphics.
Cutthroats' most interesting aspect is its economic model. After successful raids, you can head to friendly ports and exchange your booty for cash, then use your earnings to buy stuff for your crew (rum and food are high priorities), buy more ammunition, recruit new commanders and crewmen, bribe officials, and generally work the market. By exchanging information with ships you meet, you can find places where your cargo is in demand and make even more money. The interface for all this is on the complicated side, but once you get into it, it's actually pretty engrossing, and at least the graphics here are utilitarian if not actually impressive.
If you're into micromanagement and can stand simplified combat and poor graphics, Cutthroats should provide you with enough to keep you happy for a while. But if you're looking for a game that re-creates the drama and violence of 17th-century pirating, you won't find it here.--Stephen Poole
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A LITTLE BUGGY, BUT LOTS OF FUN,
By
This review is from: Cutthroats: Terror on the High Seas (CD-ROM)
Growing up, most people dream of being a pirate. After watching CAPTAIN BLOOD, most think what fun it would be to sail the Spanish Main and pillage the Dons. CUTTHROATS satisfies that desire. Lots of territory to cover, numerous towns to sack, much treasure to bury and dig up, not to mention the "Drinkin' and Whorin'". Not the most reliable game, but Eidos continues to put out patches to fix problems (Patch 5 due out this week). In spite of the bugs, well worth playing.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A love/hate relationship,
By
This review is from: Cutthroats: Terror on the High Seas (CD-ROM)
I love this game. It is exactly what I have been looking for for years! You select your ship name, build your crew and can even build an empire of sorts in the Carribean. The battles get a bit difficult to handle when you have multiple ships going against multiple foes. Every action produces a reaction. If you maraude and pillage the Spanish settlements and ships, they will abuse you and refuse to trade with you. (at which point if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, your crew will start starving to death and you will be voted out.) They will send Pirate hunter out for you, they will go out of their way to engage you in combat. On the other hand, the English might just give you a title and a salary and keep you from being hung if you continue to harass their enemies for them. I hate this game, it is buggy. When I first began playing it out of the box, it ran smoothly - but there were some true logic bugs in the coding. We are now up to patch 7. The logic bugs seem to have been fixed, but system and environment issues are another matter. It wreaks havoc on your hard drive and fragments everything like crazy. There are lots of tweaks you can do, but it annoys me to set up a new configuration just to play a game. Reaction time in the game is sometimes slow in response to an event due to all of the processing going on. The movies and sound sometimes cause system crashes and saved games corrupt. I really dislike paying to be an alpha tester. My recommendation is wait until the game is released in a final version with all tweaks and bugs ironed out. Eidos/Hothouse are very good at addressing issues (or we wouldn't be up to patch 7) but the game is just not very stable in most environments.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Clunky and Slow,
By
This review is from: Cutthroats: Terror on the High Seas (CD-ROM)
Lots of good ideas in this program but the mechanics drove me nuts... Loading Loading Loading... I am still waiting for Pirates III!
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