Looks good but is repititive.
The gameplay is just button mashing and you can't pull off crazy combos. It has to be, XXX Square Square Square, or, Square Square Square XXX. And it gets repititive...fast. It gets boring after awhile. The puzzles are alright. It dosn't come off as overly simpilistic. They usually have trying to find a way to cross a big pit or to try and open a door or even blow up a door with a barrel of gunpowder. It's not always easy and one of the puzzles don't even make any sense. On the third to last level you have to find a way to drive Mr. Norrington and Will Turner out of this room. You can't kill them. You have to go to the roof and blow up four barrels of gunpowder for some weird reason. But the rest of the puzzles are ok. The gameplay also has you going from level to level, but there isn't much difference other then the different enviroments. Although, a good thing about the game is that the game seems to get harder with you. The enemies may seem the same but there is some difference. If you go back to the earlier levels, you'll find that the enemies you once thought were hard are ridiculously easy! And that is pretty cool. You can do special moves too, but they get repititive, but they are useful. When you are stuck in a tight situation. For example, when you have three guys with axes surronding you, they can deplete your health almost immediately. But use the special move and you can kill all of them in a single hit. So there are a bunch of good ideas, but they just don't play very well on the PSP. The combat also needs a serious fix up. I gotta tell ya, the final boss is impossible.
The graphics are pretty. There are some nice enviroments. You can tell that they took some time to finish the enviroments. They are really some nice textures in it. You can really tell by taking some time to look at the enviroments. The character animations are also pretty nice. They look great and are all different. Although the framerate does suffer from time to time. I think they put to much time into doing the animations rather than the gameplay.
The sounds are great. It sounds like a pirate game, it is pretty great that they got Johnny Depp to star in it. That gets an A+ from me. But the screams from your enemies do get repititive. Like four of the same enimies may come out saying the same thing in the same tone. It gets annoying. But the voice acting is great. And the people impersonating Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley sound like the real thing.
There is some ok values too. The multiplayer battles are actually alright and pretty good. But the game is really short. And there are no unlockables or anything, which suxs. You can collect all these map peices, but you only collect them to unlock the final bout with the Kraken (which is impossible).
So overall, the game had the makings to be a great game. But unfortunately. as you know, the bad controls and poor execution stops the game from giving you a great time. The graphics are really good, but it's not good enough from kepping the game from being bad.