Port Royale 3 Review

Port Royale 3 is a business simulation game by Kalypso media. The game is set in the caribbean during the 16-17th century. The game involves running a successful town, setting up trade routes and attacking rival ships. There are two options when you start a new campaign, you can choose to play as a trader or an adventurer. The trader option focuses on trading goods between towns and building up an

economy. The adventurer option focuses on combat, attacking ships and conquering the world that way.

The game starts off with some helpful tutorials to get you to grips with the basics, you can also watch quick video tutorials for additional instruction which is very helpful. The controls are straight forward and easy to use. The interface is ok, at the beginning of the game the tutorial tells you that certain informatiom is available through certain tabs or menus and it’s not very clear what tab or part of the screen they’re refering to.

The first campaign I did was a trader campaign. The first thing you do is travel to another city to sell goods then travel to another city to buy goods. The mechanics of the trading system is easy to understand but what I did have travel with was making a profit. Each city has an icon indicating what good they are low on and they will each have goods that are very plentiful and sold in bulk cheaply. The way to be successful is buying goods where they’re cheap and selling them where they’re needed. The difficult part is that each city’s most needed item changes every few days so it’s hard to figure out what each city needs and where to buy it. It’s a bit trial and error and when I first started playing I just ended up making a steady loss.

The main character you play as is a young Spanish sailor off to see the New World. As well as trading and fighting there is a story which details how the young man becomes shipwrecked and is about to lose hope when he is rescued by another ship. He meets a woman called Elena, the daughter of the viceroy of Port Royale, and falls in love with her. He then tries to win her heart and how he does this depends on whether you pick the trader or adventurer campaign.

The other option for the campaign is the adventurer option. This focuses on combat but the beginning of the campaign starts off the same. There are the tutorials to get you started then the story unfolds. In the adventurer campaign, Elena is kidnappped and you must set out to find her and rescue her. This campaign could have been improved with a combat tutorial. When you attack a ship you can pick either an automatic battle or a manual battle. The automatic battle will weigh up the strengths and weaknesses of your convoy and the rival convoy and determine the result or you can manually control your ships and aim and fire at the rivals. The problem with this is that I didn’t know which convoy was mine, how to move them around and how to attack the enemy so more guidance here would definitely be useful.

The graphics are average but there is a nice score. The music is atmospheric and suits the theme of the game. When the advisors are talking the audio is out of sync with the movement of the mouth because an english translation was dubbed over it which is a bit distracting. Another glitch I noticed is that at the start of the game when you enter your name, gendar and pick a flag, you can only pick male. The story seems to be based around a young man and wouldn’t accommodate playing a female character so I’m not sure why they give you the option at all.

At the beginning of the game you are unable to talk to a lot of the advisors until you level up. As you improve you advance through the ranks of the convoy, you start off as a ship boy and work you’re way up.
I think it’s a good game with a few flaws. I preferred the trader campaign to the adventurer campaign. I thought it was more fun and interesting and I prefered the strategy slant it offered as opposed to the adventurer campain which focuses on combat.

When I started playing the game I wasn’t expecting a story. The game could have just been a trading game or a combat game but I liked that they included the story to make it more interesting. The story ties in nicely with the other aspects of the game, the story is about winning over Elena’s heart so if you’re a trader you do this by becoming a successful merchant or if you’re an adventurer then you have to battle her kidnappers.I think it’s an average game with a few flaws and some things which could be improved.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.