Age of Booty

Sometimes you just want to gather some friends, find a great multiplayer game, and then just have some plain old fun. Age of Booty – developed by Certain Affinity – is one of those real time strategy (RTS) games where you and your friends can lose track of time for hours. That being said, it does have its flaws so it may not be for every gamer out there.

Point, Click, Plunder

The premise of Age of Booty is quite a simple one. You take command of a pirate ship in a land where “what’s yours, is mine” is the way of life. Your goal is capture towns, collect resources, upgrade your ships and towns, and then eventually beat your opponent by reaching a time limit and/or towns captured total. The overall goal is to capture towns, but it’s not all you will be doing.

Combat will occur often, but you won’t be participating in it as this is more of a RTS game than an action one. Think Settlers of Catan or Risk. Once you click to attack a town or ship, your crew takes their positions and starts the offensive on their own. Once a town is defeated, you can capture it to make it your own.

Captured towns and ships can be upgraded to make your fleet more dangerous. Among these upgrades are improvements to your armor, cannons, and speed. The most profitable pirates will find themselves upgrading as quickly as they can while they prowl the seas. You’ll need to make sure you have a constant stream of resources (gold, rum, and wood) to grease your path to victory.

Moving between towns and sea battles aren’t the only task you’ll set out to complete while playing. You should also be looking for abandoned resources or merchant boats that drop power-ups that you can take advantage of. These power-ups include a bomb that can be used to protect your towns against enemy ships and a whirlpool that can be used to transport a ship away to another part of the map. These are key to winning, so make use of them when you can.

Yar Making Me Angry

In Age of Booty, you’ll have access to a few different modes. First, you can play the single-player adventure where you’ll be challenged across 20+ maps by the AI. However, challenged might be too strong of a term for describing the AI pirates. They tend to hyper-focus on one objective for too long, thus leaving the rest of the map open. This occurs with both your allies and enemies, so it only takes a few hours before you’re exploiting their movements and dominating the seas. Just be sure to not rely on your AI teammates to actually follow a strategy as they are more interested in their own.

This really puts a damper on the single-player experience since there isn’t much challenge to it. I found myself figuring out how the AI would play a map, then I would quickly be able to defeat them in my next playthrough. Regardless of the AI, it’s still a great place to learn the ropes before you jump into multiplayer.

Age of Mayhem

Where the game really shows its colors is in the multiplayer game modes. You’ll have the choice between local and online multiplayer. Local multiplayer can be played split-screen up to four players, which is great. Not many games include four-player split-screen these days, so it’s a welcome addition to the library. We’ve had some nights where we played for a few hours thinking it had only been one. With games lasting 10-20 minutes usually, it’s easy to fall in that “one more game” trap.

Online multiplayer (up to 8 players) can be an amazingly fun game filled with strategy and loud yells of “YA MATEY,” but it can also be a chore if your teammates won’t talk or work together with you. If you can find yourself some mates with mics, I guarantee you’ll have a great time sailing the hexagonal seas. Otherwise, you might run into matches where everyone is out for themselves and strategy is out the window at that point.

Pros

• Simple to learn, but leaves room to master
• Works great when playing with friends or players with mics
• Fun, colorful graphics that pop out at you

Cons

• The AI is very one-track minded and this can ruin your single-player experience
• RTS fans won’t find a deep experience here