Review: Port Royale 4 lets you trade your way to success in the Caribbean

Port Royale 4 lets you manage a Caribbean colonial empire.

Port Royale 4, developed by Gaming Minds and published by Kalypso Media.

Trading simulator games have been around a very long time and are a well-established genre of PC gaming with a devoted following, giving players a chance to live out their fantasies as a titan of commerce and build a business empire in the process.

Historical settings are particularly popular for trade simulator games and this latest entry in the genre is no exception.

Port Royale 4, developed by Gaming Minds and published by Kalypso Media for PC, PlayStation and Xbox, is the fourth instalment in the series and is focused on building a trading empire in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Discovery in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

The game is ambitious in scope and has a truly massive map area to cover – the entire Caribbean as well as the Gulf of Mexico region, southeastern USA and the northern parts of South America; all up it’s about 12 million square km.

Port Royale 4 by Royce Wilson.

You play a fleet commander – your choice of adventurer, trader, buccaneer or pirate – charged with forging your own path sailing under the flag of one of four European Powers of the era – Spain, France, England and the Netherlands.

To do this, you sail between towns trading goods, get into battles with pirates and enemies, and develop the infrastructure and economies of some of your nation’s settlements.

There are two modes to the game – a campaign (one for each of the European nations), and a free play mode where you can set your own goals and do pretty much whatever you like.

Port Royale 4 manages to be enormous but surprisingly shallow at the same time. While the ability to construct buildings in your colonies is a welcome addition, and the game looks gorgeous, the lack of real objectives beyond “Transport goods to make money which you can’t really do much with” end up leaving the experience in the doldrums.

Port Royale 4 by Royce Wilson.

This is especially surprising because Caribbean Trading And Piracy games have been around a very long time, and the basic formula was pretty well nailed down by games like Sid Meier’s Pirates, Sid Meier’s Colonisation and Anno 1602 several decades ago,

While Port Royale 4 is a competent trading game, it’s sailing in an awkward middle sea where it’s a bit too complex for people seeking a fairly low-key rum-running experience, and not nearly complex enough for people who want to micromanage the economies of an entire Caribbean colonial empire.

The same goods are produced and traded all over the region so it’s a matter of setting up automated trade routes to take goods from Port A to Port B and maybe stop at Port C on the way home again to repeat the process while watching the doubloons pile up

The combat is a complicated and unintuitive turn-based affair which utterly fails to capture the feeling of being involved in a thrilling high seas battle, which is incredibly disappointing seeing it’s a large part of the reason people might want to play a game set in the Caribbean in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Port Royale 4 by Royce Wilson.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with turn-based naval combat – I was looking forward to the change of pace from the real-time style most games use – but the system in Port Royale 4 is a complicated mess involving calculating how many degrees a ship can turn, how many hexes it can travel and which ship’s turn it actually is.

Some of the critical things that defined naval combat in the Golden Age of Sail are missing – for example, wind direction (ships can move anywhere they like in combat at the same speed) – and boarding basically consists of sending a ship with lots of crew next to any ship with fewer crew and then clicking a button and then the other ship is immobilised for the rest of the battle.

It’s not intuitive and it’s not fun, and the game suffers for it, which is a shame because if done properly it could have been excellent rigging to keep the game moving forward.

While on parchment Port Royale 4 should be very much my sort of game, I couldn’t help but feeling part of the treasure map was missing and the game could have used some more time in the shipyard before setting sail.