Beyond the inexorable flurry of sophomoric jokes about the title of Capcom’s upcoming downloadable title (in which we at DigitalChumps gladly participated), there actually is a pretty great game cooking. The developers described it to us as an “accessible” real-time strategy title, meaning that it won’t take you six months and several cases of energy drinks to accustom yourself to the style of play. However, that doesn’t make it shallow by any means; the developers repeatedly emphasized their quest for robustness throughout the design process. That’s why none other than Max Hoberman, former multiplayer designer for the Halo series, has taken up direction over the project.
Speaking on the concept of accessibility, Age of Booty turns its head on the traditionally complicated control schemes necessitated by the usual porting of RTS games to consoles. It’s set up in such a fashion that you can do nearly everything you need with just a few basic controls in mind—point and click, basically. You might have gathered from the entirely innocent and purely unsuggestive title that the game has to do with pirates—you’d be correct.
The basic premise of the game is to guide your pirate ship around in the waters, collecting resources and taking over towns to expand your influence. In the mode that we played, it was a race to capture more towns than your opponents within a given time limit. Upon approaching a town, you must first battle its defenses (in real time—again, just point and click and the battling is played out for you). Then, after capturing the town, you can upgrade its defenses for yourself by spending some resources (gold and wood, specifically). Likewise, you can also upgrade your pirate ship’s combat abilities by using rum and wood. There are even villages scattered throughout the map that can be plundered for resources and are much easier to battle, and pickups in the water that you can simply sail across to claim them for your own. If you’re defeated, you lose some resources, which the enemy can then take for themselves.
To spice things up even more, merchant ships can be attacked, and they drop green crates, which produce special effects. For instance, you might receive a card that can be used to steal resources from an opponent, or a bomb that creates area damage, or even a ghost ship that grants you invisibility for a short time. The key to winning is being able to balance your own power versus that of the enemy and the towns you’re looking to overtake, but the beauty of it all is that it’s packaged in such a way that it’s very easy to dive in and start playing.
The game supports up to 8 players in every match—four players can even play on the same machine, split-screen, and online! That means you can have four people at home competing against four more online—very cool. Or, naturally, you can mix and match in any way (even with AI players), so that a configuration of, say, 6 players versus 2 CPUs is possible as well. The computer AI players can also be configured with selectable personalities to provide a greater depth of customization to the multiplayer experience. For instance, you could have a CPU opponent who prefers to upgrade speed, or another that likes to boost his cannon power, for instance.
The maps are fairly simplistic in design, but there are plenty of them; at least 25 will ship with the game, with 20 more already completed, waiting in the queue for a later release. The game’s maps are balanced for 8 to 10 minutes of typical gameplay, so each match will be at least that length for the most part. You can also create your own maps in what is essentially the same map creator used by the developers, and you can even load any of the predesigned levels and change them to save your own version of them. The maximum map size is 49 x 49 cells, which is quite a large size indeed. Every couple of weeks, between 2 and 3 more maps will be added automatically to the arsenal of selectable arenas.
The Age of Booty is set to begin this fall, so at least that gives us some time to get all of those perverted jokes out of our system. It’ll be 10 bucks upon release, which is pretty amazing considering the degree of depth in terms of both customization and online play. In case you aren’t sure whether or not that’s a worthwhile investment, the full multiplayer experience is available for 48 hours in trial mode—that’s a first for any game on Xbox Live! Look for our full review of the game soon.