Naval role-playing games seems like a natural for a good game experience. Sea going adventures can often be free forming while using historical backgrounds to aid in the adventures and take players to other times and places. A classic of this genre is Pirates, and many have hoped that the systems used in that game could be repeated in another era. Swashbucklers Blue vs Grey attempts to do exactly that, but unfortunately it fails badly.

Swashbucklers: Blue vs Grey is a third person role playing game that places the player in the role of an unethical sea captain during the United States Civil War. Players take on missions at ports, carry goods and people, and attempt to capture enemy ships for profit. As the game is somewhat free form, you can decide which side you will support, the Union or the Confederacy. The game tells you that your character is not quite right in the head and sometimes hears voices that you see in the form of instructions and choices.

The game is laid out in a very similar manner to Sid Meier’s Pirates, but it doesn’t play nearly as well. Instead of simple movement through the various ports, you have to use the keyboard letters, and instead of making that simple with the arrows instead it uses ‘WASD’ (which the game tutorial doesn’t really explain), which means you have to use those keys to move; this is extremely cumbersome and it’s a wonder why a new game would have such a silly design feature.

You begin in a town with a small ship and little money and not much else. As you enter buildings in the town, dialog boxes pop up with instructions or information, but these often disappear so quickly you miss the messages. Instead of a voice track the game uses mumbling similar to Pirates, but this just appears to be annoying rather than cute.

At first you can do little, as you have almost no money, so you cannot take part in fights for money or buy much. You will be attacked in the streets to teach you combat, and this is probably the game’s best feature as the sword fighting is very well animated. There is some gore and you can eat food you carry to restore health as you fight.

The graphics in the game are quite nice even if the coloring is a little off and seems dull. Captain Gray, who is your character, doesn’t look much like a sea captain at all, which is yet another one of this game’s many odd design decisions. The ships don’t look quite right either, but it does use a campaign map similar to the Pirates' map where you can see your ship and other ships at sea while you sail about looking for enemies to attack and ports to visit.

The sea combat system has two levels. First you sail and fire your cannons, trying to hit the enemy ship or sink it. The game will tell you that you can board at a certain point, or keep shooting and sink the enemy. Sinking ships earn you no money, so you want to board and capture the enemy ships; to do this, you have to fight the enemy crew and you are greatly outnumbered. You do this twice and then you must fight the enemy captain- beat him and the enemy ship can be taken to port and sold as a prize.

While all of that may sound like fun, it’s actually tedious after awhile. The sea fights are basically all the same, and even though the boarding fights look good, it’s really a matter of fast fingers and having the good sense to eat some food while you fight. You can use a gun instead of a sword, but it really doesn’t work much better then a sword.

The sound quality in the game is decent with a nice sound track. The lack of voice over acting really hurts this game, as it would have added a lot atmosphere wise if it had had a decent voice track. The game is also quirky when setting the screen resolution controls and kept crashing when I tried to change them.

Overall this game is a good idea gone bad. It makes an effort to be a fun and interesting game, but in the end it just doesn’t come through as being really fun. The first thing a game should be is easy to use and control, and this one fails at even this simple criteria. Do yourself a favor and let this one sail by.

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