I definitely could have used a mouse to click through the million menu screens. Plus it’s obvious the game is designed with the PC in mind. So I felt I was going in blind most of the time, never sure which product to focus on unless you can memorize the wants and needs of each city. When picking which products to buy and sell from each city along my trade route, you need to know what that city specializes in, but that isn’t obvious from the screen where you make these decisions. The problem for me was the massive amount of screens to scroll through at any given time. Dictating which product is bought and sold to which city took me a couple of stressful hours of gameplay to figure out. Picking the towns and navigating the route to utilize wind and avoid rough waters was easy and fun to do, but the rest of the process I found completely unintuitive.

This is where a select convoy will travel a specific route, buying certain items from one city and selling to another. For this, you’ll need to set up an automatic trade route. Buying and selling goods individually is easy, but you’ll never make your fortune with this method. I do typically learn better by doing, but there was a lot of frustration early. Despite watching the tutorials, some of them multiple times, it took me FOREVER to figure some things out. I hate bringing attention to how stupid I am, but it’s my job, so here goes. They did, however, make me feel like I was back in school, which isn’t so nice. There is over an hour of tutorials to watch, which is nice. Unfortunately, that’s where the “simple” ends. With the money you make from these items, you buy the goods that this new city produces.

Once you buy a trade license with a few neighboring cities, you set sail with a ship full of goodies that hopefully, your neighbors are willing to pay a premium for. With your small convoy of ships, you start buying the goods that your hometown is producing.

While you’ll be hip deep in city-building, fending off pirates (or pirating yourself), buccaneering, and naval combat, the real name of the game in Port Royale is trade.

I jumped right into the campaign playing as Spain. Port Royale 4 is an economy and trade simulator set in the 17th century Caribbean. Apparently, management won’t let me do that. One for fans that have played at least one of the previous games, and one review for newcomers like me. ’d like to give two reviews for Port Royale 4, the latest edition in the long-running series from Kalypso Media.

Port royale 4 multiplayer