Pirates of the Burning Sea

Still Skin Deep

Because Pirates of the Burning Sea is a game which has two rather distinct parts to it; the on-foot and the ship based sections, the graphical side of things can also be divided into two sections. Some settings are targeted mainly at tweaking the look of the open seas.

Impressively, we didn’t have any performance problems with the game and, aside from the odd moment of lag or stutter, the game ran flawlessly – even when we recklessly charged into battle with more than a dozen ships. At times like that, the game can get pretty dramatic and interesting – but one thing I would implore you to remember is the awkward saving of the game.

You see, if you’re in a city and you quit the game then your character will go offline and be safe from attack. If you quit while on the open seas though then the game doesn’t log you out and you will still be vulnerable to attack. To be fair, the game does constantly remind you about it, so you have nobody to blame but yourself – but it’s hard to get into the habit of heading to a port.

Anyway, let’s get on to the graphics and look at the sea-faring options.

Ocean Waves

It’s a simple option and one that is available in only two flavours; on and off, but as you can see in the screenshots below it can make a huge difference to the overall look of the game.


On the left, we’ve got fabulous, undulating water complete with spume and ripples. On the right, the ship is just gliding over a perfectly flat surface which may as well be wrongly covered grass.

The odd thing is this; neither of them is good on their own. Nobody really wants to look at an ocean that is constantly either in motion or dead calm. A real ocean changes and so our advice is that you simulate a real ocean by turning the setting on and off occasionally... OK, I’m kidding. There’s no performance difference, so the choice is yours.

Visible Crew

This setting controls the number of crew members, or sea men if you’re feeling saucy, that are visible when the view is zoomed in for ship-based combat. The setting lets you choose a figure between 0 and 100 and we’ve got images of some of those settings below.


With the lowest setting, the game looks rather empty, desperate and realistic. If you click to view the big picture then you’ll see that the only person on the ship is young Captain Guybrush Gaibrush, who is mysteriously capable of swabbing the deck and rigging the main sail at the same time. Make the jump up to the medium crew however and the ship starts to look much livelier, though admittedly the whole crew is just standing around like a load of lubbers.

On full, the game is much more impressive and there’s men in the rigging because the deck is so crowded. If you ask us, putting this option to full is a bit of overkill, but you can adjust however you like in all honesty. The fact that none of the sea men are really animated all that much means it won’t have much of a performance hit if any.