Sea Dogs: To Each His Own - Pirate Open World RPG
Heads up, this review is LONG. There will be a TL;DR at the bottom.
This game is a gem, covered in a pile of shit. If you’ve read negative reviews for the game I hate to say that most of them are very much accurate. This game is very unwieldy, hard to learn, harder to master, and really doesn’t teach you anything. The closest this game has to a tutorial is essentially a few hours of being stuck on one island doing small quests to make enough money to buy a small ship. Unfortunately, this means you likely won’t know if you want to keep the game or not until after the refund period has passed.
– Real player with 663.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Naval RPG Games.
Very OLD Akella Pirates game player here when “dinosaurs ruled the earth”.
I basically played the entire game in Russian (no DLC) before it was released in English offline.
I recently went back and have been playing the DLCs online, and my immediate review is still valid in any case.
The game series has been around since 2000. Published by Akella, and eveloped by various studios. This is actually the SIXTH game in the series. Sea Dogs, POTC (Sea Dogs Modification, SD2, the bad disney production), Age of Pirates (AoP) , Tortuga - Two Treasures, AoP2:COAS (City of Abandoned Ships) , and POTEHO (SDTEHO). Black Mark Studios has most of the original modders and designs from the original games. SDTEHO has MANY of the same landmarks as COAS and similar quests. Personally, I am partial to COAS for many reasons, but predominantly the freedom to do whatever the hell you want very early.
– Real player with 504.8 hrs in game
The Spanish Privateer
Story
Set in early 17th century, just before the Pirate Golden Age, The Spanish Privateer places you in the shoes of Isabel Carlota de Castilla (but you can just call her Carlota). Carlota is an 18-year-old runaway escaping a marriage forced upon her by her parents. Not able to afford passage on a ship, Carlota offers to work for her voyage aboard Captain Rico’s ship, La Aguja. Captain Rico is a privateer, a pirate with a letter of marque allowing him to attack and capture the enemies of Spain. Carlota soon falls in love with the sea, and challenges herself to become a valuable member of the ship.
Amidst sword fights, balls, and drunken nights at the tavern, Carlota learns more about her fellow crew members and the world outside Spain. Visits to the archipelago of Azores, cities in the Caribbean and Veracruz, New Spain, teach Carlota about the effects of colonization and make her question her contribution and power aboard the Spanish ship.
No matter which route you travel down, Carlota must overcome her male crew members' prejudices, earning their respect with her hard work, determination, and intelligence.
Love Interests
Lark
Half Scottish, half Spanish, and entirely charming. Lark is a hired bard whose job is to entertain the men—and he takes liberty to entertain the women, as well. His specialty is playing the lute.
Flint
Flint is the ship’s quartermaster and protector. Fiercely loyal to the captain, Flint is equally distrustful of women. His specialty is gunnery.
Rico
Hailing from Puerto Rico, Captain Rico is no stranger to the sea. His kind and forgiving persona hides the past which granted him his scar. His specialty is swordfighting.
Features
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227K+ words
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100+ menu choices
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Three Good Endings
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Seven Bad Endings
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Six ‘Alternate’ Endings
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Love, Friendship, and Personality Meters
Trailer Music by Alexander Nakarada @ SerpentSound Studios
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
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Sea Dogs
Yes it’s old, but it places its emphasis in sea battles on sailing and strategy. You can’t just load guns in 3 seconds and then switch from solid balls to grapeshot without going through another reload. Turn rate and speed are crucial to monitor. And the story line is fun, too.
– Real player with 94.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Naval RPG Games.
Fascinating game. It was great years ago, and I finished it again with great pleasure nowadays. And that’s not a call of nostalgia. There are many old games which didn’t age well, but I can’t say such a thing about this one. Yes, it’s graphics will not impress you these days and some gameplay mechanics are rather old. But the game brings an enthralling non linear story, great music and atmosphere as well as interesting albeit little clunky gameplay.
The game is 20 years old, but it has unique walkthrough for 4 different nations and unique dialogs for all characters, not just secondary ones, but even unimportant ones. For example, there is no copy-cat tavern keepers or store owners with standard phrases. Each one has his own character, story or even quest. And a word about quests. There is no copy-paste quests as well. Each one is unique and there is a lot of them. Believe or not, but it is the only game where I still remember the names of most of the characters after so many years.
– Real player with 41.5 hrs in game