Each player will be in control of a single pirate ship, which can be upgraded in three different ways: speed, cannon and armor. In order to improve a ship's performance, resources such as money, wood and rum can be collected on the map. There are floating crates, native villages to defeat and raid, port towns to conquer and, of course, opponents to sink. Merchant ships can also be sunk in order to get a cursed card that has different effects once it's played: whirlpools and bombs to slow down enemies and a ghost ship that grants invisibility, making battles easier to win. The victory condition is to conquer four out of five towns. It's all simple enough that even a trained monkey could learn how to play.
And trained monkeys are indeed among the eight AI-controlled characters, along with other funny pirates such as Bloody Mary, Black Jack and Admiral Enis. Knowing their strengths and weaknesses is important when playing a single-player match, as some of them will go for a direct attack, others prefer to capture towns, and certain characters like to speed up their ship to avoid contact. AI-based opponents can also complement local multiplayer matches, where up to four players share a single system in split-screen. Where Age of Booty really shines, however, is in the online multiplayer compartment, with three modes and up to eight players challenging each other individually or in teams.
Halo's influence can be detected in the many multiplayer modes: Quick Match, Dueling Duos and Four by Four are the available options, with players' gamertags accompanied by a flag representing skulls and bones, daggers, barrels -- you know, good old pirate stuff. The matchmaking system lets players jump in a game in a matter of seconds and the short match length -- an average of eight to 12 minutes -- makes them accessible to both casual and hardcore gamers. Age of Booty rips another page from the Halo series' playbook by allowing players to jump from private matches with friends to online team-based battles against strangers over Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.
Maps play a major role in Age of Booty, as they can vary dramatically in resources and necessary strategies. In addition to using the numerous single- and multiplayer maps included in the game, players will also be able to access the same map editor used by the development team in order to edit the scenarios already existing or to create new ones. Everybody can easily scatter a few hexagons on an empty grid, but those who are really good will be rewarded by seeing their maps polished by the developers themselves and distributed as free content on a bi-weekly basis. In addition to free maps, expansion packs will also be released in the future, for a fee. The voyage starts this fall on both PS3 and Xbox 360.
