Pirates aren’t the rarified theme they may, at first, appear to be in video games. Having out-and-out buccaneer titles like Sid Meier’s Pirates! or Tortuga Two Treasures are certainly fewer and farther between than Sims 2 expansion packs or Guild Wars iterations; but pirates still wile their way into many an MMORPG, somehow never drifting too far from developers’ collective imaginations -- even if pirates are sometimes resigned to b-, c-, and d-list cameos. Final Fantasy XI introduced the Corsair job in the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion; collecting pirate hats in the Southsea garners reputation points with Gadgetzan in World of Warcraft; EVE Online would be reduced to a “carebear” love fest without the concerted efforts of player-pirates; even the upcoming Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures will have you initially wash ashore on Tortage Island, a location built from the ground up on recognizable pirate-branded tropes; and so it goes.

Pirates of the Burning Sea, by developer Flying Lab Software, comes to us just as the world is sitting back down in their bleachers from a fevered pitch of Pirates of the Caribbean movies, multiple History Channel affectations of ‘true’ pirate life, Master and Commander: Far Side of the World, and even the animated Treasure Planet. With all of this attention on pirates from video games, Hollywood, and literature (Master and Commander is based on the novels of the same name by Patrick O’Brian, and Treasure Planet is an interpolation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island) it’s high time for a mature (as opposed to a Disney-backed) triple-A massively-multiplayer online game to broadside the marketplace. When it comes to a subscription base, Flying Lab Software is very much aware of the 800-pound gorilla in the room, World of Warcraft, but they’re also -- pound for pound -- not going directly up against Blizzard Entertainment. Burning Sea is very much providing players with a boutique experience, adeptly steering clear of the standby orcs and elves genre that’s run several pretenders-to-the-crown down towards a gasping, watery death.

Burning Sea takes places in a stylized but otherwise historically-accurate Caribbean Sea in the early 1700s. The architecture is scaled-back and realistic for the most part, the ships are likewise though they’re undeniably floating fortresses of high art, the avatars’ costuming puts the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to shame, and the soundtrack -- while building upon the big, brassy sounds of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, also has several dozen songs that operate within period-piece parameters that ring true of the era. Only the landscapes feel hyperbolized; but thank goodness, considering the fact that flat-ocean reflections can do only just so much on their own as eye candy.

Ship-to-ship combat is paramount and serves as the shiny beacon that keeps Burning Sea beyond arm’s length from other MMOs in a crowded, online seascape. While ship combat operates virtually identical to many offline pirate games that preceded it, the tutorial makes the rather haughty assumption that this is not your first pirate game … and that you have an inherent working knowledge of the effects that wind, current, and speed have on your ability to maneuver a ship. The in-game tutorial will hold your hand one time through the process, but the lasting instructions for moving your ship, as well as avatar combat, are nothing more than .PDF files of the quick-reference cardstock included in the game box. The...