Land hoe of the starboard beam!
Graphically, given that this is running on a PSP, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest looks great. Each set of levels is based around a particular island or location, and each one of these is rendered nicely enough to make having a look around worthwhile. Each of the locations varies from the other enough to keep you playing to see what’s next.
I wish I could say the same for the enemies though as they’re sadly lacking in variety. You start off with human opponents then move on to native islanders, zombies and skeletons with three different flavours of each… throw in cameo appearances by Will Turner and the former Commodore Norrington and that’s yer lot. As I said earlier, I can’t vouch for the Kraken level as I haven’t gotten that far, my boredom threshold is too low…
Speaking of characters, Jack is very nicely animated and moves and fights like his big screen counterpart. He’s got that ‘still a bit pissed’ wobble in his walk and even sways when standing still. In a fight, Jack’s lunges and slashes all look rather cool and when he runs a bad guy through you get a particularly nice animation… Likewise, the bad guys all move well and react to attacks as you’d expect, but you do get the feeling that all you’re doing is initiating animation sequences, a la Dragon’s Lair.
The voice acting for Jack Sparrow can’t be faulted, given that it is Johnny Depp who’s doing the voice. The others use sound-a-likes and because they make only brief appearances, you don’t tend to notice that Jack Davenport isn’t voicing Commodore Norrington.
