Pirates: Duels on the High Seas is a sequel to the averagely received WiiWare game titled The Key of Dreams. While it’s tough to expect anything exceptional from this little known handheld game the aforementioned prequel had a decent idea but failed to back it up with any real weight. Now the team at Oxygen Studios are giving it another shot but in the smaller format.

The tale puts you in pursuit of seven mystical keys that will allow you to have full control over the seas. Once you’ve retrieved the first you notice that you only have 6 more days to uncover the rest. The keys can be found in numerous different locations on the globe and this keeps the environment fresh and interesting even if you are doing the same thing over and over.

You control ships around cramped areas that contain many enemy ships for you to down with the cannons. You can then search the wreckage for plunder and loot while also picking up additional crew members. It’s pretty simple stuff and it portrays this well but it just fails in mixing up the formula. The game plays it safe by not making any real interesting changes to the initial formula it lays down. This combined with the especially long seventy level plus story mode means that there is a lot to do but not really enough motivation to make you pull through it.

Meanwhile your controls leave a lot to be desired. Your Galleon controls more like a car with right bumper to propel forward and left bumper to reverse. Then you use the D-Pad to pull to the right or the left which feels incredibly slow and delayed. It makes sense considering the nature of the ship but it can make for some awkward combat.

Pirates: Duels on the High Seas does a fairly good job of what it set out to do. It’s a fairly competent pirate ship battler and there can be no real complaints about that. It’s just a shame that it’s let down by a steep learning curve for the control scheme and a lack of ambition in design. Pirates isn’t anything great but it isn’t anything terrible.

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