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Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey

Score: 60%
ESRB: Mature
Publisher: Atari
Developer: 1C Company
Media: CD/1
Players: 1
Genre: Action/ RPG

Graphics & Sound:

Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey, while having a solid and potentially good premise, falls short and just doesn't do well in the grand scheme of things. Essentially, the game tries to do many things and in the end, does none of them well.

The graphical style of Swashbucklers is meant to have almost a cartoon feel to it. Characters and environments are both stereo-typical and lack a lot of detail. The only possible exception to this is your character, Abraham, who looks like a cowboy, but is a sea pirate. I'm not saying the visuals are necessarily bad or anything, they just aren't up to par with many other games that have been coming out.

The game's music is pretty solid though, and when I found myself in towns, I often just stopped and listened a while because the game gave off some fun sea shanties. Meanwhile, the rest of the sounds were very lackluster. Character voices sound like something from The Sims and the text that accompanies the garbled conversation rarely moves slow enough for me to read (and I'm not a slow reader by any means).


Gameplay:

Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey suffers from a few problems, the least of which is slow pacing, loading screens every time you turn around and a mish mash of various gameplay styles that, while could work well together, aren't done well enough individually, much less combined.

The idea behind the game is, during the Civil War, the North put up blockades throughout the Gulf of Mexico in order to stop the supply routes feeding the South. Because of this effort, a new era of pirating and blockade running came about. You are Abraham Gray, a new pirate captain who hears voices in his head, and you are looking to make a name (and money) for yourself.

There are several aspects to Abraham's adventure. One of these styles is the standard Action-RPG town roaming gameplay where you will use your sword and gun to take down wave after wave of enemies. Here is where you will typically gain experience to level up your character, buy new weapons and supplies and talk to people in the tavern in order to get the scoop on new jobs or locations to buy and sell goods at the best prices. Unfortunately, while this part of the game could be a lot deeper, it feels very shallow, and much like everything else, becomes repetitive and boring really quickly.

While at sea, you will man your ship and attempt to attack and board other vessels. Your ship can be upgraded, repaired or replaced at town ports so the better you do and the more money you make in the game, the better your ship will be. These ship-to-ship combat games feel pretty familiar and you might recognize similar styles from games like Sid Meier's Pirates or Suikoden IV.

After boarding a ship, you will then charge your way through a couple of areas dispatching with the ship's crew and eventually dueling the Captain in a bit of one-on-one fighter-styled combat. Unfortunately, this aspect feels really awkward and just doesn't play all that well, that plus the fact that while each Captain looks different, both they and their crew all feel very generic like any other ship you've boarded.


Difficulty:

I hate it when I have to say it, but the hardest part of Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey is getting yourself to keep playing it. While some Captains are tougher than others and so are some ships, all of this can be remedied with a few choice level ups and purchases, so the game itself never stays hard. Instead, when you realize that you've seen all the game has to offer after the first cycle of gameplay (ship-to-ship, one-on-one and generic action-RPG) you will most likely just not be compelled to keep going. While Abraham is mildly interesting, he seems like a cowboyed version of the crazy Jack Sparrow, but it just doesn't have the same charm and even that aspect causes you to lose interest. So while you may be able to make it through the game with a little level grinding, neither the characters nor the gameplay you use to get better is compelling enough to make you want to continue.

Game Mechanics:

Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey just has a lot of little things wrong with it that makes the overall package feel very lackluster. While roaming around the city, you move was the WASD keys and attack by clicking away with your mouse. While you have both sword and gun available, I rarely took the time to draw and aim my sword since I always found myself surrounded by four or five enemies that moved faster than I could take aim. When running between locations on the town-map, the camera takes on a top-down view, and the WASD keys just feel like an awkward way to move. This section of the game would have been hundreds of times better if I could have just used the mouse to point to the areas I wanted to walk to.

Another simple fix that would have made the game less frustrating would have been the need to hit a key or mouse button before the text on the screen changed. It seemed like you have the same amount of time to read a two word statement as a full page's worth of dialogue, and you have no control over when you can view the next page of text. So you will be in the middle of a sentence about your next job or where you can sell your cargo and the text will just change to another sentence. This just didn't make sense to me because it isn't like the game is trying to keep up with the voicework or anything.

While Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey takes aspects of other games and throws them together in what could be a good experience, there are just too many aspects for any of them to be done well. Maybe another game will take a hard look at what Swashbucklers has done and iron out its kinks.


-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications
AKA Chris Meyer

Minimum System Requirements:



Windows XP, 1.5 GHz Intel Pentium 4, 1.5 GHz AMD Athlon 2000+, 512 MB RAM, 4x DVD-ROM Drive, 128 MB NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 or ATi Radeon 9600, DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card, DirectX 9.0c
 

Test System:



Alienware Aurora m9700 Laptop, Windows XP Professional, AMD Turion 64 Mobile 2.41 GHz, 2 GB Ram, Duel NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 256MB Video Cards, DirectX 9.0c

Microsoft Xbox 360 Undertow Sony PlayStation 2 Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

 
Game Vortex :: PSIllustrated