Another "Bore You Into Membership" freebie.
On first impression, I liked it very much. Basically, you enter the game as a character in the POTC universe, interacting with many of the popular characters from the movie (Jack Sparrow and company) as you complete missions. Every time you complete a certain segment of a mission, you unlock skills, earn strength upgrades, gain weapons, and get gold pieces (which are necessary for buying clothes, artillery, and other stuff in-game).
You don't have to just do missions, of course. You can join crews to sink ships and gain money and treasure, play parlor games, fight monsters to gain XP and practice your weapons, or just go exploring.
Some gamers have complained about the level of graphics in this game. However, this was clearly meant to be a low-end, PG-rated family-oriented game to play on many machines. Besides, they're not that bad, and the beautiful music and wonderfully done cutscenes with the POTC characters more than make up for it.
Sounds great! So what's the problem?
Disney IMO committed the one fatal mistake that so many companies do-- it decided to make its freebie so restrictive that by the time you exhaust all your possibilities in the game you become so bored with it that you don't care about paying to upgrade for it anymore. Making matters worse is that because you're restricted from trying out so many things in-game, you have no idea whether they're worth upgrading FOR. Sure, I can have more boats, can actually have more than one outfit, can play poker, can do, attain, and experience all these new things if I start paying for the game... but how do I KNOW it'll be worth it? I don't, because I never got a chance to try them in the first place!
Of course, I could just pay one month for the game to 'try it" but for me it was just the principle of the thing. Good games don't need to resort to boring players into upgrading for them; the success of Puzzle Pirates and Runescape especially bear that out.
So what's my verdict? Well, if you're a big fan of the Disney films or are just looking for a new game to try, it doesn't hurt to try POTCO out. It has great music, cutscenes, a laid-back, friendly atmosphere, and a lot of activities to keep you interested... well, that is until you exhaust your freebie account. Once you exhaust that account, there's so little to actually do in-game that you'll be bored inside of a week and either debating an upgrade or gradually logging in less and less until you forget about it. I know I did.