I'm an avid pirate fan. Not in that "Pirates and Ninjas" way so many of you bandwagoners have jumped on board (get it, on board?), but in that I used to do pirate reenactments with the storming of St. Augustine at the Castillo De San Marco in St. Augustine, Florida. To sum it up, I love pirates, I know a whole lot about them, and I thought it would be a good idea to tackle Tortuga: Two Treasures. I'm a tough critic: anyone who's familiar with my previous writings knows it. I won't say I am sorry for what I write, but I will say that I know there are many more lenient people out there.

In a pirate game I sometimes look for realism. I never see it, because frankly realism in that period would make for a very slow and boring game. I don't take any offense to unreal pirate adventure on the high sea, but Tortuga sometimes pushes my ‘hey wait a sec…" limits.

Allow me to rewind a bit, and tell you a story of my experiences in Tortuga: Two Treasures. The game opens with a little plot and a tutorial battle. Hey, that's cool. The graphics for naval movement are great. The combat is pretty easy, though your ship's "cannons" have a range of somewhere between 25 and 30 feet. Mind you, in some ways that's more realistic than most games, but even in high seas naval combat, if a ship had spare cannons they'd certainly take any shot at any range they could muster. After sinking the tutorial ship I was supposed to hijack a merchant. Sounds good. I started off by sailing towards this white stuff on the map, not really sure what it was. Apparently they would tell me in the next tutorial phase that it was a coral reef. Whoops! So, I start taking damage from dragging my hull across millions of sharp sea creatures and rocks. I finally pull my ship out of the reef when I notice the enemy ship has followed me in! Crap… they're taking damage too. A moment later and the ship has sunk, me never having fired a single shot at it. Mission failed, start over.

Seeing where this review is going are ya? Well, like any good pirate, I trust my other pirates with the brilliant plan of me getting thrown in prison. Where? St. Kits, one of the rather wealthy and WELL guarded English ports of the time. When I break out of prison (rather than sneak out), I simply cleave my way through all the guards on the island… alone. Only one guard on the island has a gun, but unlike a real gun of the time it isn't a one shot-2 minute reload: it's apparently a flintlock Gatling gun. Luckily bullet wounds are nothing a few black magic healing potions can't fix.

Unfortunately, I will say land combat is awful, boring, unrealistic, and uninspired. What do you expect in a pirate game? Still, the idea of spending half the game in this mode is a bit depressing.

After you storm one of the greatest ports of the English Navy you escape in a dingy armed only with mines and head full speed for Tortuga. Once you arrive in Tortuga, you are abruptly told to avoid pirates at all cost. Why? Do they want your dingy? (Ooh, that can be interpreted in many ways!). So your job is to run around dropping mines to keep them off your tail until you make it to the beach. Awesome. So there I am doing just that when I drop a mine and head for a cutscene about what I need to do next. It jumps back to my ship when I realize the mine I had dropped was ticking down for that entire cutscene. Before you can say "Crivens!" the mine blows up, taking my dingy with it. Mission failed. Start over.

I uninstalled the game at this point, too annoyed to continue. Sea battles were good, nothing incredible, land battles were bad at best. Stupid AI and design flaws (these aren't even bugs, are they?) apparently are more frequent than rain in Oregon.

The game does have decent writing and voice over work, though it's obviously a little campy. It suits it just fine though. I'd be interested in knowing what the plot had in store, but not interested enough to spend time on it when I could just re-watch Pirates of the Caribbean (either of them) at home on DVD.