Who doesn’t like pirates? They have beards, hats and usually tend to be in the ocean. Now pirates have invaded the Wii in the form of Pirates: Key of Dreams, a game running along side the future DS release, Pirates: Duel on the High Seas.

Once you boot up the game you’re given two choices, either single player or multiplayer. In single player you Take control of a navy captain posing as a pirate, your ship is then sent all around the world to find the mysterious Key of Dreams. While the story is unexceptional enough, the gameplay is in the same league with roaming around and destroying boats to open the next area being the game’s idea of ‘fun’. It gets very repetitive and even when you have some excellent weapons at hand such as land mines, rockets and buzz saws you will rarely find the need to use them as enemies are, for lack of a better term, stupid.

The occasional boss fight is thrown in to mix things up and while the bosses are definitely larger in size and more challenging than normal enemies, it still doesn’t increase the excitement of the game and if you’ve bought it for the single player experience only, you will find that the game is unfortunately linear and fairly short.

But why settle for only single player? There is multiplayer to mess about with too, even if you don’t have anyone that wants to play. Pirates: KoD supports 4 player deathmatch with bots and settings for the amount of kills before the match ends, normal or turbo game speeds and which of the 30+ stages you want to fight in. I’m shocked that the game doesn’t offer more in the way of customisation with colour selection, player names, custom score limit and team deathmatch all completely missing and that’s just a few things that I could think of. Wifi play isn’t supported either which is a big shame as that could of opened the game up a lot but the multiplayer that Is here works well with some friends and has a very panicked gaming moments rushing around an arena killing your friends with a flame thrower.

Whatever amounts of disappointment singleplayer holds, the multiplayer makes up for it greatly as long as you play with friends. AI in the multiplayer is, at the moment at least, severely broken. Now I’m unsure if this can be fixed with some kind of update for the game but as it stands, bots in multiplayer cant pick up items to use as weapons in matches meaning as soon as you have a special weapon such as the buzzsaw you’re pretty much guaranteed a win as long as you can shoot straight.

Shooting straight may sound like an easy task for the normal gamer, but the controls aren’t without frustration. While they feel fine for the few minutes, the way you’re forced to hold the controller starts to ache after 20 minutes or so of real gameplay. This can be even shorter if your Wiimote has an official jacket on it which makes the controller harder to hold and therefore control. You can’t really blame the developers for this and cramp is something almost all gamers have to deal with the first time they handle a controller in a different way.

Before I do closing comments I want to give you a piece of advice about the music - either mute it or turn it down. The repetitive menu music is not good and I’m happy they made the choice to take it out of the actual levels. Unfortunately, when they took the music out they didn’t replace it with anything else so there is no music in the game, not that it would affect you if you decided to mute the TV due to the menu music.

Closing Comments

While Pirates: KoD is a fun game, it lacks a large amount of polish. Similar to the recently released Alone in the Dark on the Wii, the potential for a really great game is there, but as they rushed towards getting the game to release, it missed so many opportunities to make the game more stream lined and remove some rather large and important bugs. There is still enjoyment to be had here, just not as much as there could have been. If you share a Wii with friends all chip in to pick this up but at 1000 points if you are looking for a solo player experience, try something else.

Score - 5.5