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Some of the great details on units. Before a battle is played, however, the game shows one of its most interesting points. After selecting a character on the campaign map and moving to a mission, the player is presented with a written story, accompanied by sketched images. This helps advance the plot and really draws players into the world. It is almost a choose-your-own-adventure style story, allowing players to actually decide what their character will do. This helps players relate to the characters. The choices made in the story often affect the coming battle - what sort of battle it will be, how many units on each side and of what type. It is a nice feature. Battles are handled on real time 3-Dimensional maps, and really allow the graphics engine to shine. Units are very detailed, and environments are lifelike. The game is great to look at. A variety of unique environments are present during the game, adding a lot of variety. Maps are usually quite large and detailed, providing various ways to meet objectives, and allowing for different play styles. The game can be strategically paused at any time, which allows players to stop and assess the situation. A scene in one of the interactive stories, with choices underneath. Battles are generally quite long with a specific objective rather than just “kill enemy”. They are well set out and fun to play. One particular battle, for example, takes place on another plane of existence, with an fast day/night cycle. During the night, players can move their troops around and advance towards the goal, fighting some enemies, while slowly summoning spectres to join their army. During the day, players would have to hide under giant clouds, and other, stronger enemy raiding parties would attack. This sort of diversity and construction in the battles is great and provides a lot of diversity. Players control various units depending on their chosen character, though they are basically in the stereotypical groups (archer, cavalry, foot soldier etc.) Units sometimes have abilities they can use for specific purposes, like turning invisible for a short time. Hero characters have several abilities that can be bought and leveled up. These provide tactical avenues, which can be worked into a strategy. For example, when faced with lots of enemy archers, you can cast Fog of Avalon to create a fog to weaken the accuracy of the archers, then charge to meet them head on. A chaotic fighting scene with a variety of units in the fray. At this point, the game is quite polished, aside from some balance issues (for example, a group of archers took out a group of cavalry) which should be fixed by release. Most issues can be found with the controls and interface. The controls are a little unintuitive, for example scroll out to zoom in, scroll in to zoom out. The camera is also a little hard to control at times, though this does get better as players get used to it. The interface can be, at times, cluttered, as abilities, stats, a moving model of the unit selected, and a map, all reside next to each other. This is mostly a problem only in the heat of battle. Overall, Fallen Champions is a good mix of role playing and strategy. Structured battles provide good fun and diversity when playing. The role-playing aspects are handled well, the story will likely draw players in, and the stories before each battle are a great interactive way of setting the scene. Balance and control issues hamper the experience but these could be patched or fixed by release.

The Pirate Stronghold, the first available, and some units. Missions range from collectable missions, assault missions (going in on land to destroy buildings, kidnap people), chasing down boats and waging war on the seas. The world is alive, with boats from various other factions such as the Netherlands, Britain, Spain and France always sailing around. Missions earn money, which can be spent hiring units, building strongholds, buying a new boat and even upgrading the boats you own. Naval warfare is handled well, with simple controls that are easy to use. Clicking on either side of your boat fires the cannons on that side. Different boats each have their own stats, and even small boats can take down a large one, with the use of good tactics. Items gathered from travels can be used to transport you around the map, or give you special buffs or abilities. The naval battles are the shining aspect of the game, as it should be in a pirate game. Along the way, the player character will be able to become Champion of each of the Pirate factions. Among other bonuses, the leader of each faction will join you, becoming another controllable Hero unit on land. They level up as well, and can even command 3 units each, in addition to every other hero under your command. By the end of the tale, it is possible to amass quite the crew. Each faction has various units that can be hired if the required building is built. These range from lowly pirates or musketeers, to men with thundering cannons or massive hammers. A naval battle, with an island and settlement in the background. The land battles are not often as good as the naval ones, prompting a feeling of “get in, get out” when attempting a mission on land. Often the best strategy is to select everything and throw it at the enemy, which is a shame. Land maps are hard to navigate, the addition of a zoom - both in and further out - would greatly benefit navigation. Weaving through city streets, bag of gold in tow, trying to get to your boat before the inhabitants of the town get you may sound good, but it is difficult when you cannot tell which lane to take. The game is fun, and intriguing enough to pull you into the story. Sometimes it is just as fun to go and be a pirate - start a war with one of the other factions and steal their gold. One of the main drawbacks of the game is bugs. In this review session, a particularly nasty one raised its head, preventing the acquisition of missions and thus the progressing of the story. Also a serious bug that corrupted saves, one after the other. Nothing can be done about this other than starting anew. Other spelling mistakes and frequent crashes (frequent is not overstating it) mar the overall shine of the game. While there is little doubt that these will be fixed quickly, it is a shame that they exist at all. Pirates of Black Cove is a good game, not very “hardcore”, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is a breath of fresh air to just sit down with it and have some good fun, without impending doom looming around the corner. Well made, the game is held back by serious and not so serious bugs. Spelling errors, crashes and game breakers all need to be addressed. With the fixing of these, and the addition of some features such as zoom in land scenarios, the game could be just that little bit better. Update: Since this review was published, Nitro Games have released a few patches for Pirates of Black Cove. One of them totals around a whopping 908Mb. As evident by that size, many of the bugs mentioned in the review have been fixed, along with other tweaks and fixes, small new features and the like. Crashes are much less frequent. The bug mentioned that halted progress has been addressed and removed. Saves are no longer corrupting (in this reviewers experience) though saves that were previously corrupted have not been fixed (that is to be expected). Essentially, the major bugs in the game have been removed, and this is a great thing. While there are some new bugs brought with the patches, or not yet addressed, those that seriously impair gameplay have been removed. With any luck, the game with continue to be patched and these smaller issues will be dealt with.