Cutthroats: Terror on the High Seas

aka: Pavillon Noir, Unter schwarzer Flagge
Moby ID: 1956

Description official descriptions

You are a 17th Century pirate in the Caribbean. You can do all kinds of pirate things: rape, pillage, capture ships, receive letters of marque, burn towns, kill civilians, loot houses, recruit other pirates, look for buried treasure, sell stuff you capture for pieces of eight, etc. :)

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Windows version)

81 People (59 developers, 22 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 63% (based on 20 ratings)

Players

Average score: 2.0 out of 5 (based on 13 ratings with 4 reviews)

a great game

The Good
Great battles on land and sea and a very long play time

The Bad
Occasionally crashes, hard to steer more than one ship and marines move very slowly

The Bottom Line
Now unfortunately it's out of the shops but you can still buy it over the internet. It's a great game if you're into piracy and the caribbean and it's not directed at any general gamer. It has a large land and sea mass in the game with about 50 or more prots to plunder, loot and burn and thousands of different ships sailing, ranging from small merchant ships to convoys and galleons to the dreaded pirate hunters there are many to sink, capture and also avoid and runaway from :)

The ship's flags play a big part in this game as well and there are five nations all fighting over the Caribbean. Raise the same flag as the ship and you can put up a useful secondary flag like request food and truce but raise a rival country's flag and you may as well just hoist up the jolly roger.

When you decide to loot a port try to find the right one, don't attack a heavily fortified spanish port if you only have a couple of cannons and a handful of men look for a small port with only a few guards. The main goal of the battle is to either make the town surrender or loot the town (always try to get the treasury and governor's house) and/or burn it but beware the wind can carry smoke and alert the guards

The game did start off with alot of bugs and crashed basically all the time but all you need is the latest patch( 7.0) and nearly all the bugs are fixed.

The graphics on the land are not brilliant, but considering it is quite an old game this is acceptable.

After getting the patches and playing till I was a pirate king I would give this game a total of 9 out of 10.

Windows · by ruairidh dalglish (2) · 2004

Pirates! it aint....

The Good
The graphics are not bad.. especially the ship battles. Nothing spectacular, but not bad.

The Bad
The interface is a bit clumsy, especially when buying cargo. You would think if you are buying cannons, food, etc.. that you would want the stuff on your ship. Now if you buy more than you can carry, I could see leaving it on the docks so you could prioritize what you take and what you don't. Occasionally, trying to remove a ton of items off your ship automatically sends your officers running to the docks for some unknown reason, and if you don't catch it, forget about taking command of that nice ship you just captured as you abandoned him on the docks with the rest of the cargo. Also, when I give a command, I expect it to be carried out.. at least to a reasonable level, when I order a ship to concentrate fire on the decks, I certainly do NOT mean, spin in a circle and draw fire away from the ship I'm currently commanding, I'll worry about the incoming cannon fire myself. If they can't contribute to the battle, at least they can stay out of range. (You can insure this at the beginning of the battle by telling every additional ship you have to just spin in place, well out of range of the enemy, and do all the fighting with your flagship, but then why have a fleet at all except to carry cargo if you have to do that)?

The Bottom Line
If you really liked Pirates! Gold, well just make it work with your Pentium using a slowdown program.. but if you find this title in the bargain bin, its nice to add to your collection, but Pirates! Gold is a lot more playable. Sure, the land battles dont have the fancy graphics, but the interface is so easy (Pirates! Gold) you can just concentrate on being piratey and such, and not worry about the men carrying out your orders (unless you are starving them, naturally).

Windows · by geoffrey o'roark (2) · 2001

Worst pirate game ever.

The Good
The game concept is every bit as compelling as it was when Sid Meier introduced it with Pirates! way back in 1987. Cutthroats promises deep and open-ended gameplay combining action, real-time strategy, and role-playing, all in the undeniably romantic historical setting of the Golden Age of Piracy.

The production values are fairly high (for the time of release). The opening cinematic sequence sets the mood for plundering and pillaging very nicely, and some of the in-game graphics are quite attractive as well. Colors are bright and vivid. Ships are fairly detailed and authentic-looking; if you pay attention, you’ll notice that the big warships really do look like warships, with many sails and multiple gun decks. The Caribbean map you use to plot your course also looks good. Sound effects seem quite realistic, and the catchy musical score may actually be the highlight of the game (which is probably not a good sign).

The designers certainly had their hearts in the right place: give the fans of Pirates! what they love, only more of it. This translates into lots of options, particularly during ship battles. You can choose your kind of shot (ball, chain, grape), create fire ships, send out rowboats, and grapple and board enemy vessels. You can even disengage from a boarding action if you change your mind.

There are a lot of different kinds of goods available for sale (or theft) in Cutthroats. Some are necessary, like food and rum for your sailors, while others are mainly trading fodder. The economic model may actually be overly detailed, but it’s still pretty interesting. If Cutthroats were a playable game, then the trading sub-game would probably be the best part…

The Bad
…so it’s just a cryin’ shame that Hothouse/Eidos totally dropped the ball on this title. So many good ideas, and such a great blueprint to follow in Pirates!, with so little competition – how could it go wrong? In oh so many ways!

First of all, the game is a technical mess. It runs slower than molasses on older PCs, or even on a very fast Windows XP machine with the “Windows 98/ME” compatibility setting turned on. Load times are simply unbearable; you could be halfway across the Caribbean in Pirates! in the same time it takes just to get started in Cutthroats. You can just run it under XP, but then you get the opposite problem: it’s too fast to be really playable. Even if you do get it running, don’t get too happy, as it will probably just crash to the desktop in a few minutes. As usual, saving your game often is a very good idea.

The interface is a nightmare of clunky buttons and tiny little icons. Thank God for tool tips, or else you’d never know what half of those little pictures are supposed to represent. It’s all in keeping with the overall philosophy of the Cutthroats design: make even the simplest task dull and complicated.

Want to set sail? You’ll go to the big map, only to be told that you have a bunch of goods still sitting on the dock, so you have to go back to another screen and load your ship, since it was apparently not obvious that you were purchasing goods with the intention of carrying them elsewhere. Want to investigate that ship on the horizon? Ok, so you’ll go to the “crow’s nest” view, but you find out that it’s a friendly ship, so you want to go back to the big map and continue your voyage, but for some reason you can’t opt to do that with a command, you just have to sit there while your little ship slowly sails off the playing field. Sounds like fun, huh?

Should you get lucky enough to find prey (or accidently target a friendly ship, which is all too easy to do) you get to engage the enemy ship in battle. Finally we get to the fun part, right? Nope. Battles are shockingly boring. Once you’ve chosen your shot, the main thing left to do is click the mouse on the enemy ship in the hopes that your crew will respond and fire the cannons. As usual, information is too scarce to make any sound judgments about tactics. How many guns does the enemy ship have? How large is the crew? What condition is their vessel in? Who knows? You don’t know the number of enemy crew until you begin a boarding action, but of course, an estimate on that would be most helpful before you actually board. What’s worse is that boarding actions are also boring actions – there are no swordfights to engage in, no real-time tactical orders to be issued, just a tiny little animated icon showing the crew totals dwindle from the unseen battle.

As for the game’s audio-visual chrome, even that aspect manages to disappoint. Some of the graphics and sounds are just plain sub-par. Humans are drawn strangely, in a way that is hard to describe. They don’t look natural, even by 3D video game standards. It’s like a bunch of department store mannequins have been dressed up in pirate attire and brought to life. Creepy stuff. The voiceovers are not unnatural so much as annoying. The cheese factor is high, but more bothersome is that fact that the voices keep telling you the same darn thing over and over, every time you issue a routine command. “Ay cap’n, the men’ll follow ye all the way to Davy Jones’ locker!” is amusing to hear at first, but not for the umpteenth time in just a few hours of play.

I really can’t say too much more that’s negative about Cutthroats – not because it’s not bad, but because it’s so bad I can’t play it long enough to even experience certain parts of it. Land battles? Treasure hunting? Diplomacy? Retirement? I’m sure it’s all there, on paper at least, but may God have mercy on the souls of the poor buggers who are forced to play this game long enough to get involved with that stuff. The poor bastards could have been, and should have been, playing Pirates! instead.



The Bottom Line
It’s basically a remake of Sid Meier’s Pirates! – only without the elegant design, competent programming, and sense of fun.

Windows · by PCGamer77 (3158) · 2007

[ View all 4 player reviews ]

Trivia

Patches

As of July 2000, seven patches have been released.

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Piracy on the High Seas
Released 1992 on Amiga
Pirates: Duels on the High Seas
Released 2009 on Nintendo DS
High Seas Homicide
Released 1993 on DOS
Ironclads: High Seas
Released 2010 on Windows
High Seas Havoc
Released 1993 on Genesis
High Seas Trader
Released 1995 on DOS, Amiga
Sunset Studio: Love on the High Seas
Released 2009 on Windows, Macintosh
Scooby-Doo!: Horror on the High Seas
Released 2004 on Browser
Ralph Bosson's High Seas
Released 1987 on Commodore 64, 1987 on Apple II, 1988 on DOS

Related Sites +

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 1956
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Raphael.

Additional contributors: jean-louis, Patrick Bregger.

Game added July 15, 2000. Last modified October 22, 2023.