Personally, I tried to do it all. I enjoyed every type of game within it. The game seems to pay homage to everything from Brittany Spears Dance Party to Thief. As an avid fan of the cell phone game Falling Numbers, I was greatly amused by the dancing aspects of the game. Your partner simply gestures in one of eight directions and you must quickly hit the button to complete the dance move. The better you dance, the more likely you are to gain her heart. In ways like this it reminds me of the Sims. You must dance, complete quests and buy presents in order to finally marry the governor's daughter. Yet, it is not so in depth as to become tedious. You can easily blow the poor girl off and sack her city if that is your thing.

The sea battles are as good as anything I've played in a PC game. They lack some of the details of a game like Sea Dogs, in that you have infinite ammo, and your guns simply reload, you cannot tactically swing your ship around to shoot from another side. That said, they are also faster, and in many ways more tactical. One of the neatest things is frantically trying to bring your ship about to avoid the spray of cannon balls headed your way. My only complaint about the sea combat is that sometimes, when caught in dead winds, you really, really want that "fast forward" button Sea Dogs had.

The quests in Pirates are a little bit disappointing. They seem limited to "kill" and "find" archetypes. Either kill the Pirate, who is not so subtly labeled as "The Evil So and So", or find the treasure based on a rather vague map you assemble. Some have nice stories, and can veil their inherently identical mechanics, but most just feel like means to an end.

The disappointment of the quests is made up for ten fold by the battles. When you board a ship, find an unruly guard bothering a bar maid, or even annoy someone's fiancй, you will be thrown into sword combat with that person. It is all rather simple; there are three attacks and three defenses, each one countering another. Superficially, this seems a bit lacking, but it is made up for by the animations. Admittedly the environments are repetitive, but they are all so well done that it doesn't matter. It's essentially an inverted tug of war. You either push them over the side, or they do it to you. In between, there are buckets to trip on, back flips to perform and ropes to swing off of. It is so well animated that you forget the fact you've seen the same little scene play out a hundred times before. It feels more like a movie than the often plodding hand-to-hand combat you may be used to in video games.

Another pearl that surprised me was the way in which combat for towns was done. I fully expected to meet their governor in hand-to-hand combat. Once, this did happen. I was told he intercepted me and we would duel for control of the city. Every other time I took over a city, I was given a battlefield, turn-based game. My units included buccaneers who can shoot their guns from a good distance, pirates who make a wonderful melee unit and my officers. Through the use of common sense and tactics, you can defeat armies much larger than your own. Things like elevation, taking cover at the right moments and catching them in bad positions make or break the battle.

For example, it is very important that you don't leave your units exposed. Leaving them hidden in trees can be the difference between life and death, as being in trees divides their ranged shots by two. Another key is to try and catch their cavalry when they're traveling through trees. Attacking down hill or flanking them is also extremely useful.

This is the usual fare people have seen before in other Sid Meier games, but unlike those games, this is just one tiny aspect, and not the game unto itself. Pirates! is the amalgamation of everything Meier has worked on. From Civilization to Gettysburg - if you're a fan of Meier's titles, Pirates is the game for you.