Hands on with Pirates: Duels on the High Seas for DS

We blame the recent resurgence of interest in all things piratical on Johnny Depp. If it wasn't for his portrayal of a drunken, bohemian, dandy pirate (still somehow managing to make us pot-bellied men-folk feel inadequate) in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, everyone would still be into mindless action films and sci-fi operas.

Pirates: Duel on the High Seas is the latest attempt to bring the swashbuckling vocation to the palm of your hands, and we recently managed to gain some hands-on time with an early build. Shiver our timbers if we're not going to update you on how it's shaping up.

In keeping with the light-hearted manner in which these murderous, thieving miscreants are portrayed nowadays, Pirates doesn't take itself too seriously. It's a jolly romp of a tall tale featuring seven cursed keys spread across locations ranging from the Chinese sea to The Bermuda Triangle.

The emphasis here is very much on fast paced action, with a hint of adventuring and the merest suggestion of an RPG-style leveling system. Viewed from a slightly slanty top-down angle, you send your ship forwards by holding R, rotating it clockwise and anticlockwise with Left and Right on the D-pad. B and A control your weapons, including an unlimited quantity of laterally-fired cannon rounds and an assortment of finite fore and aft-launched special weapons. Think mines, rockets and buzz saws.

During our time with the game we encountered plenty of skirmishes with navy ships, often finding ourselves outnumbered six to one against craft three times bigger than our own. In between these scraps you'll spend your time looting ports and sinking defenceless merchant vessels for booty. The progression between each of these tasks is fairly linear, although you can backtrack and explore the odd path leading away from the beaten track. If there be such a thing on the high seas. Arrr.

Occasionally you'll encounter a survivor from one of the ships you've just scuttled. Pick them up and they'll offer their services to you for a fee. Quite how they feel they're in a position to bargain with a bunch of cut-throats isn't adequately explained, but it's basically a way to implement the levelling system we mentioned earlier.

You have four areas in which you can boost your abilities through acquiring crew members – the speed of your ship, the range of your guns, the speed of your repair crew and the capability of your lookouts. At any time you can enhance one of these attributes by touching the appropriate symbol on the lower screen – hitting the sail icon if you need to beat a hasty retreat, for example.

At this stage Pirates: Duels on the High Seas is shaping up to be a solid action game with a pleasingly light-hearted tone. It will, however, be interesting to see if Oxygen can navigate around 'solid' and strike upon gold. We'll man the crow's nest and let you know as soon as a review copy is sighted.