It becomes a bit like a seaborne game of Railroad Tycoon, except instead of tricky moments where you decide whether to take a plunge and build an expensive railroad halfway across the map to undermine your opponent’s corporation, Port Royale 4 just has you continuously expanding with very little big risk/reward decisions. Most of your time is spent watching your money roll in from lucrative trade routes and periodically purchasing some new ships or buying up some businesses.
It’s not really about pivotal decisions but a series of gentle tweaks. However, this illustrates perhaps the biggest problem with Port Royal 4. This is a huge relief, as though setting up my routes required a bit of fiddling, they didn’t require any more micromanagement to get keep them ferrying goods for a solid profit. Not only can you set up trade routes for your convoys of schooners and brigandines to follow and tell them exactly what to buy and sell along the way, you can even let them use their own best judgement on what amounts to buy and sell. Thankfully, there is a hefty bit of automation available to make trading more manageable. Learning the ropes of Port Royal 4 is made a lot easier by the addition of some tutorials but as I scanned my eyes over the estimated run time of each of these tutorials and found they cumulatively clocked in at upwards of an hour, I was a little intimidated. But is this ambitious marriage of finance and swashbuckling really fun? Well, that’s a part of it, but there was also residential zoning to be considered balance sheets to be done and tax forms to be filled! Yarr! Port Royale 4 tries to involve in the broader economics of this exciting time and place to create a more well-rounded simulation of being a merchant or privateer. When you think of the crystal blue Caribbean sea during the Age of Sail, surely you imagine it being filled with the sound of cannon-fire, stained with the blood of pirates and hiding vast riches of buried treasure. Shiver me timbers and adjust me commodity prices!
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