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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on February 5, 2001
Company: Bethsoft
Product: Sea
Dogs
Controls
As
you’d expect, Sea Dogs offers a multitude of controls for you to handle,
everything from controlling your character on islands, to controlling the ship
– raising/lowering sails, etc. This isn’t too complicated after a while
& soon you’ll be at ease with your key layout.
That
said the controls are flawed in some aspects. The ship’s deck view (Used for
battling other ships generally) can be fairly awkward at times, particularly
when it comes to moving around the deck itself. Sails tend to obscure your view
if you raise your vertical viewpoint, or on some ships you can’t get a full
360 degree view as part of the ship itself obscures your view – with no way
around it, or you can’t raise your viewpoint enough. Although to be fair most
of your cannons will be firing from the sides so it won’t be too
harmful to your gameplay.
The
worst aspect of the control system would be those on islands themselves. Your
characters controls are quite simply delayed. Rather than having instant
responses to movement inputs your character instead seems to remain
reaction-less for some moments. The turn rate with the keyboard is also rather
delayed, leaving the mouse as the best option for controlling some aspect of your
movement.
You’ll
probably get used to the controls after a while, or rather get used to
compensating for the flaws
in the control system.
Gameplay
Sea
Dogs features a nice variety of gameplay. This can basically be categorized into
– Exploration, Sea battles, Trading & Quests (Although the quests
essentially comprise of elements of the previous 3).
Sea
Dogs offers a lot in the way of Exploration, beginning with just a few islands
on your map, as you progress further into the game you’ll open up more
islands, or you may even come across them yourself by sailing across the map. As
you discover more islands this will generally open up more trading routes for
you, or offer new quests/characters for you to interact with. Overall the
Exploration is a nice part of the game & its good to see the game world
opening up to you as you go along.
Inevitably
with all your exploring, or simple trading you’ll come across others, in many
cases the random events which occur while sailing could be situations such as
being attacked by pirates, or Spanish/English/French/Pirate ships on the
horizon, do you engage them ? Much of the time it may be wise to avoid fights,
but then again you gain experience by fighting against the enemy (Depending on
which party you are fighting for at the time, e.g. If you have an English letter
of marque, attacking English shipping will turn you into a pirate). Battles
generally occur with both ships some distance from each other, then what happens
from there is all down to your/their tactics. Cannon’s have limited line’s
of sight, as such you will have to angle your ship at the enemy in order to fire
at them. Depending on distance you will want to raise/decrease the angle of
fire, & so on. All this is rather easy as you should be using your mouse for
this. Nothing complicated controls wise, sheer simplicity, aim & press the
fire button, this is one of the reasons why sea battles are quite enjoyable.
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