PORT ROYALE 4 Review for Xbox One

Port Royale 4, by developer Gaming Minds Studios and publisher Kalypso Media, is a strategy game where you control your colony and trade between other colonies through convoys of boats, often called vessels. You can hire captains and sailors for your boats, get in naval battles with other colonies and improve your colony as your economy and resources grow.  

Most of the game is heavily revolving around the whole trading concept. Right off the bat, you’re going to want to get all your trading routes in and automized because that is the lifeblood of everything in this game. You have to trade your resources in surplus to make money to buy resources that you aren’t producing so that your colony flourishes with money and resources

Everything surrounding the trading is where the steep part of the large learning curve comes in. The tutorial itself estimates it will take 56 minutes to learn all from it, then it takes much longer to get a hang of all the other things you can do in the game. A learning curve is not a bad thing in a game by any means, but it is something that should be taken into account if you are considering buying this particular game. 

Another aspect of the learning curve is that I couldn’t figure out how to navigate through the menus very well. Each city has its own menu, each with five tabs to it, you have an action menu that leads to six more menus, each of those have at least four tabs to them, there’s also a menu to buy ships and separate one to assign them to your convoy. It’s very easy to know what you want to do but can be very hard to find how to do it. 

To the game’s credit, it likely has a lot to do with the fact that I played this game on Xbox One, with the corresponding controller. I think it is fair to say this particular problem with not knowing how to manage the menus would be much more simplified with a keyboard and mouse. You would likely have an easier time navigating through the menus on PC, albeit there are still too many menus.  

There are absolutely some positives of Port Royale 4 that should be recognized. For one, the visuals of the game are stunning. The opening cutscene was really well done and looked great. Then the actual gameplay has a great top down view of the map that you can zoom in on and notice all the little details in everything, you can tell a lot of effort was put into making the game look as best it can. It also does a pretty good job of telling you everything you can do through the tutorials, the negative part of that being there are just too many things that need to be covered in the tutorials. 

When it’s all boiled down, Port Royale 4 has a lot going on and you have to know all of it to get your game started properly and correctly. However, when you do get it all down, you get all your trading routes automated and you can for the most part just watch your economy grow as you turn the game on 5x speed. It can quickly go from overwhelming to underwhelming. There are still things that you will have to account for, naval battles will happen and you still have to develop your colony but it feels like it loses most of its gameplay that way.

Check Out the Port Royale 4 Trailer:

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