East India Company: Privateer Review (PC)

Nitro Games is once again trying to get gamers’ attention by launching the expansion Privateers, in the RTS series of East Indian Company games. Their earlier expansion, maybe more rightly called patch, Pirate Bay, enabled the player to choose the pirate side, leaving everything else more or less the same

In this version the monotonous trading is downplayed in favour of new and more intriguing battle scenarios. You now can take charge of a fleet commanded by privateer captains, a sanctioned version of a pirate fleet, supported by a government to be able to “legally” attack and claim other countries fleets at will.

The overall goal is still about making money through trading as in the original game, but you can now choose alternate ways to reach your riches, by attacking other ships or completing dubious missions that are thrown at you. There are two Privateer campaigns offered, each focusing on special time periods. One new feature is that a fleet now can attack heavily armed forts on land, partly addressing the earlier somewhat unrealistic total lack of land based battles, which were missing earlier.

The game play is considerably improved, with mission oriented tasks (smuggling, envoi hunts, port blockading and more) making the game closing in on some of the traditional gaming heights of a typical RTS. The commanders you can hire for your ships now have additional special skills for you to pull out and there are also specialists such as, surgeons, cooks, marine officers, constables, to influence the battle outcome and make the game more intricate.

Nitro Games have done some homework and listened fairly well to their gamers’ feedback, adding deeper tactics and variations, throughout the expansion, and attempted to provide a more action packed RTS experience.

As a mercenary striving to make as much money as possible, but now in a given time, you pretty much can do your own thing, trade & navigate as before, go for dark missions and gradually increase the power of your fleet. But beware of consequences, because anything you take on will be remembered! There is no longer any identification with a specific nation making the game play far more dynamic, and the missions you receive from other nations has to be declined or accepted with care. One mistake and the remainder of your fleet may end up as driftwood. The missions range from intense smash and grab runs to tense escort missions, trying to sneak in and capture a rival ship.

The game play is aimed towards more aggressive players. There is not much difference in controls and general graphics compared to earlier launch. However, the tedious loading screen to enter the port view, is finally removed which was a necessary improvement.

This darker implementation of EIC, is a refreshing approach. In multiplayer mode there are 2 new game styles added, the Breakthrough and Beehive modes, which enhances the multiplayer satisfaction. In breakthrough mode one team try to escort the flagship, while the other team attempts to destroy it.

Privateers is an interesting game, even a potential winner, that could have been a classic RTS, but the decision to downplay some parts in order to focus on some other parts does not really go well with us players. Most of us, want it all from scratch, to explore at will, not portioned out a bit here and there.

Conclusively the expansion has many advantages, but it all should have been in the original game, together with the due updates (most of them requested by gamers I believe) done in the Pirate Bay and Directors cut edition. Then the game would probably have been the hit Nitro Games strive for and actually deserves, with all the work they put into all four “versions” of EIC so far. Maybe in next edition it all comes together in one nice package, for us all to fully enjoy.