High Seas Trader from Impressions is a build-your-own-fortune game set in the 1600's. You begin with a trading vessel and it's up to you where you trade and in what you trade in. Just to make it more interesting, the designers have thrown in the storyline that your father, a Viscount, was stripped of his title and died penniless thanks to a certain evil Earl who himself is long gone. However, you feel that you must honor your father's memory by becoming a Viscount yourself, thus restoring your family name.
To accomplish this task, you start with a ship and a small balance to begin trading in. As your fortune grows you can buy estates and treasures which gain you promotions. You track your progress through gauges in your cabin which measure your development in daring, nobility, loyalty and honor. As you gain status in these areas you are granted more and more titles.
Trading in High Seas Trader is simplified by the use of logs and journals. Going from port to port quickly becomes confusing when you try to remember where to buy the bargains and where to sell for a quick fortune. HST provides the player with a log which keeps track of the selling and buying prices of each commodity in each port. This takes out most of the hassle in trading and lets the player keep his mind on playing the game.
Of course, you can't have a trading game without people trying to hijack you on the seas, and HST certainly has plenty of that. When moving from port to port you're always having to defend your ship from the occasional pirate. Depending on your ship, you have a varying number of cannons to defend yourself with. Gameplay in combat is not that impressive, though. The graphics are decent enough, but combat just involves putting the enemy ship in the middle of the screen and firing. It's bland but bearable. If you get close enough to the enemy ship you can board the ship and watch the ensuing battle which is nothing but an animation of both ships side by side with guys fighting all over the place and a set of graphs at the bottom of the screen showing how many people both ships have left, what their moral is and so on. Boarding is done quickly but the player is totally taken out of the action. If you want to skip the battle scenes, you can have the computer automatically decide the outcome of a ship battle or boarding action and tell you the results immediately. It's like Impressions knew this might be something you didn't want to deal with. I was really hoping there would be more to the combat in this game, but the real action is in the trading and accumulating your fortune.
You also have to worry about the upkeep of your ship by making repairs and upgrades. You are always taking on damage from battles and wear and tear. Limited repairs can be made at sea and full repairs can be done at port. Simply choose what to repair by clicking on it and all you have to worry about is how much it costs. When you outgrow your own ship you can buy one at a port or you can commission one to be built.
Traveling from one port to another requires you to keep your ship stocked with food and supplies for the trip. You also have to make sure that you have enough people manning your ship. You can choose among soldiers, sailors and apprentices to sail your ship, but remember that you get what you pay for. You have to keep your men well paid and happy or you just may end up walking the plank.
Sailing from one place to another is very easy. Just buy a map for the portion of the world you want to trade in and you're ready to plot your course. The map screen shows your ship and all of the ports that you have a map for and all you have to do is click "waypoints" onto the map showing where you want to go. Then, if you want to steer your ship (which could take some time between place to place) you can do so by following left and right arrows telling you which way to steer to get to your next waypoint. If you'd rather get the game going, you can tell your first mate to pilot the ship which puts the game into a compressed time mode. The screen shows the course you've chosen and where you are along that route, and moves you along that course very quickly. The game will resume normal time if anything interrupts your trip, like a storm or a pirate, but basically this gets you from place to place fairly quickly and keeps the game moving.
High Seas Trader is not a fantastic game by any means but neither is it a bad game. It is entertaining and at points can be quite absorbing. It's not really addictive or exciting and the real strategy is in the trading and not on the seas. The logs make it easy to trade but with all of that information you simply find yourself trying to get from one place to another without any battles to disturb your fun. This would probably be a great game for a young person since it involves finances, planning and simplistic battles, but for anyone else, there are other games with better graphics and better game play.
