The undeniable focus in the game is on the ships, with variability determined by a number of factors including hull strength, decks, sails, maneuverability and speed. As ships are damaged by cannon fire, rips appear in sails and holes materialize in hulls. The background can be adjusted with the game controls, but at its highest setting, the seas, sky and coastline are beautifully rendered. Backround sounds include what one would expect from a naval game: waves, cannon blasts, and creaking rigging, and sinking ships make a satisfying gurgling noise as they go down.

The soundtrack is composed of wonderful period-inspired marches that sound like they'd fit into a Hollywood film. The game interface is not easy to understand or utilize. The tiny icons are difficult to make out and the small written cues that pop up at the bottom of the screen are in a thematic naval font that is impossible to read.

In addition, the small buttons are simply difficult to click on with the sluggish mouse. The game manual, a measly 28 pages, offers little in the way of instruction, gameplay, or strategy hints. Despite gaming community complaints about glitches, few of signficance were experienced during the review of the game. Graphics: Sea and sky backgrounds are brilliantly executed and ships are amazingly detailed, but the interface graphics are difficult to comprehend and manage.

Enjoyment: Naval battle aficionados and those who enjoy slow, strategic games will have a fondness for the details, but the casual player will be uninterested. Replay Value: The more than historical battles and main campaign offer a significant amount of replay potential. And if anyone is still afloat, you can come alongside and send in the marines - which sounds more interesting than it is.

Although there are more than one-off scenarios and a few linear campaigns, there's very little atmosphere or story in the game. As you progress through the ranks and command larger fleets of ships there's certainly plenty to do, but unless naval combat really greases your gangplank you'll find the gameplay rather repetitive, with very little to drive you on. If so, well spotted, as Russian developer Akella is responsible for both games, and while Age Of Sail II may seem like a cut-down version, it has its place.

My interest in the period is inspired only by pirate flicks of the s, so I'd have to say that Sea Dogs is a better, more interesting game.

But then, what do I know? Upon opening the box, what I mistook for a quick reference card fell out. In actuality, this pamphlet is the game's manual.

This non-effort of documentation pictorially explains the interface, defines a few terms, and then abandons you to discover the actual workings of the game through frustrating trial and error. Twenty-three pages is perhaps adequate for a FPS or platform game, but when applied to a wargame of moderate complexity, it barely provides a foundation for understanding the basics of the interface.

The documentation being as it is, I was left to puzzle out the where and why of the game on my own. This was quite confounding when you take into consideration the various interface items that have no apparent effect, or must be manipulated with other elements to produce any result. The many icons, sliders, and buttons provide weak or nonexistent feedback and audible cues are almost completely absent.

Thus, often you are left wondering if something worked at all and what the actual results were. For example, when attempting to order multiple ships into a formation, the buttons don't click or light up; only when a group's assigned to a hotkey do they visibly show as selected. Where's the logic in that? The first mission of the first campaign requires you to capture five British vessels with your single American ship.

After many hours of attempting to capture a single ship by the prescribed method, I gave up, only later to discover that they must simply be forced to surrender to win the mission. However, I didn't know that and the briefing was quite misleading - as many of them turned out to be.

Eventually, I was forced to repeatedly abandon the mission in disgust before I adopted a "to hell with it, I'll just kill 'em all! Any challenge that the game presents is greatly diminished by feeble AI. The enemy's tendency is to sail straight toward or away from you, and since the ships of the period mounted few, if any, cannons to the fore and aft, this neutralizes their ability to employ weapons against you. So when the enemies approach aggressively, you can simply place them directly off your side and wither them with constant fire as they drive straight towards you, often without firing a shot in return.

One mission began with my ships in a bay, surrounded by multiple enemies on all sides. Three quarters of the enemies turned in various directions and ran aground all around me as the rest sailed past into open waters. On the note of beginning missions surrounded by enemies, I should point out that a good deal of the scenarios begin with your fleet and the enemy well within one another's cannon range. I found this extremely unrealistic and irritating. At the instant the mission commences, both sides dump all their cannons into each other without any opportunity for tactical maneuvering.

The stories I've read while researching sail combat certainly don't lend themselves to the feeling of 'instant action'. Meanwhile, your own ships' crews apparently suffer from over-indulgence in rum. You can essentially tell your ships to get in a line abreast, line astern, general pursuit, custom, or no formation. But this usually results in your fleet clumsily dancing around one another, often while being bombarded by the enemy. Have you ever been to a parade and seen the fez-wearing Shriner guys zipping around in circles in their little go-carts, going nowhere fast?

Not dissimilar to watching a full twenty minutes pass in real-time as the sun set and rose again, and my ships still weren't in any formation. It was mass mutiny, so I had all the virtual captains executed on the fo'castle! The game also allows for the assignment of waypoints. Unfortunately this met with approximately the same level of success as formations had. In theory, you click a trail of waypoints for your fleet to follow, select the 'hotkeyed' ship group, and finally you are required to click on the tiny flag that serves as a waypoint marker.

Even if it actually worked in any capacity, it certainly is unnecessarily difficult to click on one of those miniscule flags without zooming the view extremely close. Again, I attempted to test this in open waters where I had sufficient space to fiddle around without the distraction of enemies about. Two of my ships sailed directly toward the waypoint as requested, while the rest picked a random direction to wander off in.

So much for that feature. The crew management interface allows for assigning your virtual swabbies tasks such as repairing sails, hull, and cannons. Cannon repairs apparently do not function at all. Hull and sail damage can be repaired over time, but once again, this feature has problems. The crew will go about your repair orders for a given period and then mysteriously forget what they were doing and dump themselves back into the available crew pool again without warning or any feedback as to why this occurs.

When you have a sizable fleet and many ships need repairs, it is far beyond inconvenience to force the player to constantly re-issue the repair orders.

The enemy ships, however, seem to have an over-active need to repair themselves.