E3 2006 First Look Preview
One of my favorite movies
to come out over the past couple of years was Pirates of the Caribbean. Since a
second one is releasing soon, it’s only fitting that a game come out along with
the new movie to help complement it. Bethesda Softworks is releasing Pirates of
the Caribbean: The Legend of Jack Sparrow on PS2 and PC, but this isn’t going to
be identical to the movie. This is actually a separate side story that you will
get to play through.
Pirates will be a third
person action adventure platformer, complete with lots of swashbuckling,
swordfighting, and some puzzle solving sprinkled in for good measure. You can
control either Jack, Will, or Elizabeth, all of which will move and fight
together as a group (the AI will control the ones you are not directly using)
and each one will have their own unique moves that can help you get out of
certain areas or circumstances. For example, Jack can pour oil onto his sword
and ignite it, or Will can throw hatchets at a range. In addition, each
character will also be able to pull off combo moves as well as perform various
third party style movements like acrobatics or blocking. The controls seemed to
work well, and have a comfortable “left stick moves the character, right
controls the camera” thing going on that we’re all used to
The demo showed off some
good fight scenes, and showcased Will and Jack taking on a group of swordsmen in
a hail of kicks and swings. There will probably be some item collecting that
will go on as well, since each enemy dropped a token which was immediately
picked up … but didn’t seem to effect health or anything. Once the battle was
over, there were chests to interact with and certain objects in the environment
(boxes, barrels, etc.) could be destroyed or picked up and tossed.
Overall, this Pirates
game (not the same as the MMORPG that Disney is releasing by the way) looks to
have some promising elements to make it worth looking at.
