Pirates of the Burning Sea [PC]

The world of massively-multiplayer games is depressingly uniform. Peruse the MMO rack of your local game emporium, and all you'll see is box after box of tired old pseudo-Tolkien prattle, with the odd sci-fi space epic thrown in for good measure. And given that we're pretty much obliged to play them all, we've reached the point where if we have to kill another goblin or collect another rat skull, we're going to collectively hurl ourselves into Yahoo!'s Crack of Doom (tm).

Which is the main reason we like Pirates of the Burning Sea so much. There's nary an elf, mage, or hey-nonny-nonny to be seen. Instead, Pirates takes place in an idealized, Errol Flynn version of the 1720s Caribbean, and boy, does it make the most of it. We challenge any new player, upon logging into the game for the first time, not to head for the chat box and start rolling out the pirate talk cliches. It looks the part, it definitely sounds the part, and the atmosphere is laid on so thick you can practically smell the heady mix of rum and tobacco oozing out of your monitor.

Setting Pirates in its proper place in the incestuous family tree of video games is tricky, but it's rather like a cross between the all-too-familiar melee combat of World of Warcraft, the outstanding economic system from niche space MMO Eve Online, and the ship-to-ship combat from Sid Meier's Pirates. If you've never played any of those, don't worry: the game eases you into its more intricate mechanics with well-conceived tutorial missions.

As you start the game, you're shoved into the cut-and-thrust world of the Spanish Main already a captain. Spared the worries of recruiting a crew and buying your first ship, you're set up with a basic vessel and the patronage of British, French, or Spanish monarchs. If those don't appeal, you can opt to freelance by joining a kind of pirate coalition.

From there, you're free to roam the open sea to your heart's content. You'll spot many other ships, both player-run and computer-controlled. Although there are safe zones where you can't be attacked by other players, the Spanish Main is a dangerous place. Venture beyond those zones and you're fair game for players of opposing nations; and yes, if you're beaten you run the risk of losing your ship and belongings.

Appropriately, ship-to-ship combat is one of the areas where Pirates really shows its mettle. Successful captains have to balance all kinds of factors: wind speed and direction, armor levels, hull strength, different shot types, and more special abilities than you can shake a mast at. Practice enough and you can take down larger vessels, especially if you have a couple of co-conspirators - and if you can get in close enough, you can attempt to grapple and board the ship.

But after that, it takes a turn for the worse. Next to the smooth and addictive ship-bourne scenes, boarding actions are messy, hard to organize, and ugly. In spite of the clever "balance" system you can exploit to knock down opponents and the three different fighting styles to master, the World of Warcraft-inspired combat simply lacks depth.

Pirates, however, certainly doesn't. Captains who tire of their life on the open waves can set up complex trading operations back in port. Different cities offer different resources, and you can build production buildings to harvest them, even while you're offline. Once you have raw materials, other buildings process them into goods, and from goods into usable items like cannonballs, rum or ships. The best items have to be made this way -- you're not going to spend much time "farming" for items dropped from vanquished opponents.

All this complexity means it's unfeasible to make all your own gear. Your options are to trade, via a flexible and easy network of auctioneers, or to organize with other players into production teams. Even at Pirates' early stage of release, trading coalitions are springing up everywhere. If you have a buddy with a ton of iron mines, you can specialize in processing his product into items like nails and then pass them onto another player to build into ships. It's a deep system, and one that'll really reward those players who fancy themselves as smugglers.

As if that wasn't enough, Pirates also packs a complex nation-versus-nation system. Aggressive and well-organized nations can force enemy ports into "contention," gradually increasing their level of lawlessness. Enough contention and a 24-vs.-24 player fleet battle ensues. The winner gains control of the port and the loser has to pay additional taxes for their productions.

There's no shortage of things to do, then, and the vast majority of Pirates' features play out just as well as its theme is realized. The game is at its best when it is most imaginative, and even after the novelty of the outstanding setting fades, you'll find fathoms of depth in the ship combat and trading systems - especially once you find a regular group of sea-dogs to join. Judging the long-term potential of an MMO a few days after launch is never easy, but Pirates definitely has the wind at its back.