Hoist the mainsail and square away the forecastle...
You can pick up secondary weapons such as bottles, knives, pistols and grenades which you can use on your opponents at any time, and when you have to fight a crowd these are useful in thinning the numbers out but they are in limited supply so you’ll keep coming back to the sword. By collecting pieces of a treasure map scattered around the levels you can complete treasure challenge sub-levels which empower Jack with special moves. These special moves usually take out the opponent you’re fighting and stun all the others so they’re worth getting but they do little to relieve the feeling of repetition.
The bad guys are just about as dumb as it gets, and short of walking off the edges of drops to get to you, they’ll just come along in a straight line, looking to get close enough to take a swing. Now as dumb as they are, they’re very polite and will patiently wait until you’ve stopped attacking one of their own or made an error in the attack sequence before having a swipe themselves. You’ll often find yourself in the middle of a crowd of bad guys and although you could use a special move to stun a few of them, it’s hardly necessary as they won’t attack you as long as you’re attacking one of them. When you’re not swinging your sword in a suitably rhythmic fashion, you’ll be working on some of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest’s diabolical puzzles. Well, I saydiabolical but I mean very mildly taxing… it’s not helped by the big flashing ‘Pirate Action’ icon over anything on the screen that you can interact with.
Now the purpose of all this bloodletting is to help Captain Jack find the missing pieces of the Kraken Statue, which for some unknown reason will then allow you to access the final level and do battle with Davey Jones’ pet kraken. To do this you need to find all the pieces of the treasure maps and complete the five treasure challenges. The maps are usually hidden in barrels lying around the place or very occasionally you’ll find one in a poorly hidden secret area.
This idea of exploring the entire game world to get access to another area isn’t new, but sadly for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, it suffers from a fatal flaw. Most games that require you to collect extras make sure that collecting them isn’t integral to the completion of the game. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest does just the opposite; you must find all the map pieces. What happens if you don’t? Well you end up, as I have, completing all the available levels and left wondering where, over the last three levels, you missed out on a piece of the map. By this time you’ll have become so fed up with the repetitive button pounding fighting that you’ll have absolutely no urge to go back and find the errant piece.
I spent two solid evenings mildly enjoying the hack and slash action, thinking that the puzzles were a tad simplistic and the action was pretty repetitive, but having fun nonetheless. The UMD is now sitting on my shelf, waiting for the time when I pluck up courage to go back and find that last piece of the map, something that I have no wish to do as I write this, even a few days after getting as far as I did.