Age of Booty

Age of Booty is a simple Real Time Strategy game developed by a new studio named Certain Affinity. The new studio is composed of industry veterans and it really shows in this recent gem they released for Xbox Live Arcade. Where most studios might have seen the Arcade setting as a place to turn a quick buck and release a product of questionable quality based on the lower price, Certain Affinity has gone the whole nine yards in providing gamers with plenty of bang for their buck and lasting gameplay that will satisfy both casual gamers looking for a game that doesn't require a 50-page manual to understand and hardcore players looking to master the seas.

The game has each player controlling one pirate ship on a hexagonal board. You move around the board by selecting a hexagon with the analog stick and pressing the A button to send your ship sailing, simple as that. The goal of the game varies from map to map, but typically has you trying to capture a certain amount of towns before your opponent reaches that goal. Most maps also have a time limit, so matches do not go beyond 5, 10, or 15 minutes. Combat takes place when your ship is next to a rival ship, a town you're trying to capture or a smaller village you're ransacking. Combat is completely automatic. You fire at things you're next to, and they return fire. Your ship can repair itself at any town you control or your home base, and if your ship it destroyed you respawn at your base ready to sale again. Simple right? The game gets it's depth and complexity by using the hexagon map in clever ways. For example, if you are next to two rival ships, you will split your firepower between the two of them while both return fire to you. The same situation happens if your opponent is next to one of your towns that you're defending as well as your ship. This gives the game a great amount of depth, as the position you choose for your ship can drastically alter the outcome of a battle. 

The game also features a simple resource system which has you collecting rum, wood, and gold from your voyages. Ransacking towns will net you a resource and crates you find floating in the water and loot from destroyed enemy ships will also reward a resource. Towns you capture and hold will continue to produce resources, indicated by an icon on the town itself. This means some towns are more valuable that others, and competition can get pretty fierce depending on what resources are available in a map. You spend these resources to upgrade your town's defenses or to upgrade your ship. Each town can be upgraded two times, giving it more firepower to defend itself and more health. Ships can be upgraded by increasing their speed, increasing their health, or increasing their firepower (which also slows the ship down a bit). Each of those statistics can be upgraded 3 times, meaning each ship on your team might perform in vastly different ways (one might be a quick ship who can rush to defense, while the other might be a slow moving juggernaut who can decimate enemies). Towns cost gold and lumber to upgrade while ships cost rum and lumber. It's all very easy to grasp but it gives the game a great layer of depth.

Merchant ships you come across can be destroyed to gain power ups. You can hold one power up at a time, and you activate them with the Y button. There are four power ups in the game and if they are used correctly they can change the tide of a battle. The four power ups are: a bomb, a ghost ship, a whirlpool, and a thievery card. The bomb is what you assume it would be, you set it town and after a few ominous ticks it blows up and damages all the hexagons around it for a considerable amount of damage. The whirlpool effects a single hexagon and sends any ships that are in it or enter it to a random place on the board far away. The ghost ship makes your own ship invisible, but you have a chance to be removed from this state once you get into battle. Lastly, the thief card (symbolized by a pirate monkey) steals up to two resources from your opponent. Power ups can be used in clever ways for both offense and defense, and it adds a lot to the game.

The graphics in the game are sharp, and quite impressive for an Xbox Live Arcade game. The water in particular looks very nice as ripples flow behind passing ships and cannon fire splashes into the water. The art style of the game could be described as somewhat comical or cartoony, with loony characters and pirate monkeys, but it very much fits the fun and oddball setting of the game (it's called Age of Booty, what did you expect?).

The sound is also pretty impressive for an Xbox Live Arcade game. From the opening menu you're presented with rousing pirate music. In the game you'll hear ambient music of seagulls and waves, exactly what you'd expect from the setting. Cannons explode and ships crash downward with satisfying sound effects.

The single player part of the game, the challenge mode, has 21 challenges for you to complete (with seven for each difficulty; easy, medium, and hard). You'll occasionally be joined by AI-controlled allies in this mode and they don't always do what you want them to. It's really a team-based game, relying on the combined efforts of your group for success, and this always translate well to single player where your teammate can either be a rockstar or be doing something completely useless. Not allowing you to control the other ships might be the game's one fault, but only having you control your own ship does keep the game simple to understand. The single player challenges will last about 3-4 hours for your average gamer, and for the most part they are a fun diversion.

Multiplayer is the heart of the game however, evidenced by the fact that the Xbox Live Arcade Trial Version of the game actually gives you two days to play online multiplayer. If you're not into multiplayer, this game might not be for you. For the most part the multiplayer is a blast. You play in either 2v2, 4v4, or the newly added 2v2v2v2 mode. Sometimes your teammates can be totally useless, sitting at the main base and doing nothing but soaking up upgrades when resources become available, but I have not seen this many times when I've played. Really this is the same problem with all online multiplayer, and whether you're playing a racing game with some douchebag racing backwards on the track and taking everyone out or if you're player a FPS where the same douchebag is killing teammates, it's a sad fact of online multiplayer. When your teammates contribute and coordinate, it can be a lot of fun. You can also play up to 4-player split screen offline, and you can include AI opponents, making this a good game for those situations where you actually have other people over. The simple to understand gameplay mechanics mean that this would be a good game for a party, one that might include liquor as evidenced by Giantbomb's own preview of the game!

The game selects a map for you based on the team sizes, but you can create a custom game if you want to use a specific map or even one that you create. That's right, Certain Affinity actually went as far as including a fully-functional map creator in the game. Keeping with the theme of the game, it is very easy to use but it includes enough options that it should satisfy people looking to make their own unique challenges for friends. Certain Affinity has already released a few additional maps into the game that automatically download for free, and between the users and the developer there should be enough new maps to last for a long while.

Most of the achievements are pretty easy to get, but I had fun collecting them. A large portion of them are devoted to finishing all the challenges in single player. You also have random achievements for things like blowing up two enemy ships with a single bomb, or letting an enemy destroy all the defenses on a town and then swinging into to claim the town for yourself. It won't take you too long to get all the achievements, but they are a nice additional goal for players and it's nice to have achievements that are realistic to get (some other offerings in the Arcade are not so well designed).

Overall Age of Booty is a extremely fun real-time strategy game that is well-worth the 800 MS points (about $10 USD). The trial version of the game even allows you to play multiplayer for two days, so there really is no reason not to give it a try. The multiplayer community on the game will hopefully last for a long while, as even after you've gotten the full 200 achievement points the game is still great to load up for a quick game or two. There have been a lot of high-quality Xbox Live Arcade releases recently, such as Megaman 9, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Braid, and Castle Crashers but none of them have really provided a long-lasting and compelling multiplayer experience. Certain Affinity has really raised the bar for multiplayer games on Xbox Live Arcade, and I look forward to seeing what the studio can offer to gamers in the future.