The combat is made slightly more interesting by an array of ‘power-ups’ which you can purchase for your ship in between missions. These come in the form of things like specialized cannon balls (there are three types of those) and ‘Kraken Bait’ which as you might guess, lures a giant sea monster in from the depths of the ocean to attack the nearest vessel. It is certainly entertaining watching a ship being ravaged by huge tentacles, at least for the first couple of times. You see, just as is the case with so many elements of this game, most things that start off entertaining gradually dwindle into repetitive monotony. The fact of the matter is, no matter how many upgrades your ship has (and there really aren’t a great many options), combat still consists of floating around in circles tapping the left mouse button constantly (the cannons only fire when a ship is range so you can’t really waste ammunition either.

Just to add to the fun, the land combat is much worse than the naval combat! Sword battles are truly a button bashing affair, far more so than anything you do at sea because once you’re in a battle you don’t even have to move (in fact its rather difficult too even if you want to). The system wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t insist on chucking absolutely tons of enemies at you if you so much as look in the wrong direction. And so we come to one of the game’s biggest flaws: everything is incredibly unbalanced. One minute you’ll be fighting a pair of pirates that are so easy to defeat you’ll be half-asleep as you do it, and then the next you’ll find yourself confront by 10-15 enemies all brandishing swords and/or guns! Thanks to the fact that the camera centers on the person you are fighting it is very difficult to attempt running away (and if you do you would probably just attract more enemies who seem to be able to detect your presence from miles away) and so you can do nothing button bash, drink the occasional health potion and hope for the best.

There are a few different difficulty modes but given the balancing issues present throughout the game there really is no incentive to push up the ranks. The only noticeable change with the higher difficulty levels is the number of hits enemies can take (be they ships or men) and so rather than challenging you to better yourself, things just get more frustrating and even less involving. Now, none of this would be nearly as bad if it weren’t for the extremely linear nature of the game itself. The core of the game is split up into missions with set objectives (generally simple, ‘destroy this’ or ‘go here’ tasks) which must be completed before you can move on. Sounds fine at first but for some reason the developers have restricted exploration to a slim boundary around the current island you are visiting, venture too far out and you get automatically turned around and told to return to battle. Even if you could wander off it wouldn’t do you any good as the oceans are largely empty other than the ships that make up the mission you are currently on and towns are inaccessible unless they too are mentioned in your mission objectives.

We’ve got no problem with a game having an over-arching storyline, it helps meld things together. But we can’t help but feel that Tortuga: Two Treasures would have benefited massively from a GTA-style free-roaming presentation where the player chooses when to partake in missions and spends the rest of the time exploring, finding hidden items and the like. Unfortunately this is not the case and the game suffers, for a game this linear to be truly enjoyable it would need varied gameplay that was fun and surprising, but as you will know if you have been reading up to this point, this is not the case either. The main game will take a fair few hours to complete on the average difficulty setting, but once that’s over there really is little to no incentive to come back for another go. When you finish the game you get given an overall score which you can upload to the official website and compare how efficiently you did with other gamers (we came in at 150), but if you’re anything like us even that won’t be enough of a reason to go through the game for a second time.

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