PotC is an open-ended game, as with Morrowind, another title that has the Bethesda stamp, albeit created by different developers. You have the freedom to explore the world as you see fit, exploring the jungles and hidden caves, solving quests and sinking ships as you move about, all in the name of experience in order to level-up your character. You can trade coast to coast, even board ships in true pirate fashion on the high seas if you’re so inclined. Unlike Morrowind, however, the environments are much more limited: there’s no pillaging of villages and peoples' homes, and you can’t even enter most of them, unforgivable for a game about pirates. As there’s little reward for following this path, ultimately the incentive for doing so is lost.

To progress the storyline along you’ll need to speak to people, though most NPCs have very little interesting or relevant to say. Your partner will mutter a few words to you when you initially speak to them, but this has no relevance to the text interface ultimately used to control the conversation, and it quickly becomes repetitive.

Controlling Nathaniel in the world is similar to that of Resident Evil, and it doesn’t work particularly well - it’s clumsy at best. Movement left and right is over-sensitive and can’t be “optioned”, so you often find yourself walking zigzag rather than in a straight line. Forward travel on the other hand in laboriously slow. You can switch to a first person viewpoint, but it really doesn’t help matters.

Continue meandering about, and at some point the game will go to a load screen. It mostly does this when you’re entering buildings, as you might expect. At other times it just inexplicably loads when you’re wandering around a town. Why does it need to do that? Possibly to break up the tedium of whatever it was you were doing, or to give you time to make a cup of tea, or maybe just to give you another reason not to play it.

A good combat system is a must for any RPG, and once again PotC fails to produce the goods. Combat consists of drawing your sword and blocking, and with a bit of luck you’ll be able to get a couple of swings in against your opponent. Get hit more than a couple of times and you die, fight more than one enemy at a time and, more than likely, you’ll die. There’s no skill involved, there’s little in the way of tactics and it certainly isn’t fun. You can try to shoot people, but you have to draw your sword first in order to be able to fire. Just like with real pistols then.

Sailing forms a major part of PotC, and whether you’re trading, escorting passengers or following the storyline, you will need to travel from island to island over the seas. What a shame then that it’s so badly done. Sailing isn’t easy, but why make it so difficult in a computer game? Tricky isn’t the word. Irritating or exasperating is. Get caught in a storm, and the likelihood is you’ll sink and die. Get caught in a battle against more than one ship, and the likelihood is you’ll sink and die. Is anyone seeing a pattern here? It is better than the hand to hand combat; lobbing cannon balls at your enemy’s ship is probably the most rewarding part of the game, especially the first time you get to sink your foe. It gets easier with more ships in your fleet, but you’ll have long given up before then. If you want to make it even harder for yourself, you can always turn arcade sailing off in favour of realism. Oh joy.

A great deal of the above can be forgiven once you’ve built your character up a bit and got some better weaponry. Combat becomes a little easier, sailing likewise, but one thing kills the game more than anything else: bugs. Thousands of them, alright a few, but enough to stop any initial enjoyment you might of had. The journal, essential for this type of game, seems to have disappearing entries or fails to add them at all. This pales in comparison, however, to that which will stop anyone purchasing this game...ever: a “corrupt your save files” routine. Not just a single file, but all those belonging to PotC.

You may be asking if there is anything to redeem PotC, even just a little bit. If you ignore the laggy frame rate and infuriating camera angles, it does look pretty, especially the midnight sailing sessions with the moonlight reflecting off the water. It’s not enough to save it from sinking to the seabed though, and it’s doubtful if anyone would care to raise it once it’s there. This is no Mary Rose.

Who would want to buy this game? Only Sado-masochists who enjoy shoddy frame rates, huge loading times, unintuitive controls, poor menu design, bugged gameplay and boring storylines. It could have been good, that’s what infuriates most of all; instead the game seems rushed out the door to tie in with the movie release, presumably for a few pieces of eight, yargh. Go see the film, just don’t buy the game, get Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic instead - a vastly superior RPG in every respect.