Once again, a LEGO game has two different versions for handhelds and consoles, and once again, Prima Games has risen to the task to document all of it. And like all of its LEGO predecessors, LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean focuses largely on collectibles first, gameplay second, and story third. The handheld version of the game plays pretty straightforward with the expected collectibles in virtually every LEGO game: ships in a bottle, red bricks, character tokens, and True Pirate statuses. The console version of LEGO Pirates on the other hand has an amazingly large number of collectibles to hunt down. There are red hats (red bricks) to hunt down in the ever expanding hub world, and the game world has the True Pirate statuses, ships in a bottle, and secrets that can only be revealed with Jack’s compass. Finding all the secrets awards players with yet another gold brick.

So it’s safe to say that the authors of the strategy guide for LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean definitely had their work cut out for them. For the most part, the guide was spot on with everything, particularly the handheld section. Unfortunately, the console section had some glaring, yet not crucial errors and it omitted one thing that I though was the most important.

The strategy guide’s biggest problem was the fact that NONE, and I mean none, of the True Pirate stud requirements were correct for the console version. All of them were off by 5-10k studs. Fortunately, they were off in that they were overshot, so in the long run, it didn’t really affect how I was collecting studs. I thought the goal was 70,000 studs and became pleasantly surprised that it was only 60,000. If it was undershot, it might have irritated me a little more than it did.

The other issue I had with the console portion was that none of the compass secrets were listed. Occasionally, compass secrets were mentioned in the walkthrough text, but I would have preferred to have a list of what secrets are available in each scene section of a story mission. Mentioning them in the blocks of text does not warrant a quick find when you’re trying to earn that last gold brick. It’s because of these compass secrets that I’m struggling to achieve the 100% completion, and I really hate that I have to pause the game and read multiple blocks of text to hopefully find a mention of which scene a certain secret lies.

On the flip side, the handheld portion is damn near perfect. Thanks to its help, I was able to easily 100% while in Japan. The only criticism I have is that I wish that the collectibles list presented in the beginning of every chapter would have been broken up into ships in a bottle, character tokens, and red bricks, instead of lumping them in all together as “collectibles.” I think it would have made a better design decision and would have helped make hunting down each type of collectible a little more efficient. But I admit that I’m just being over picky at this point.

The strategy guide for LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean isn’t perfect, but it will definitely help all completionists achieve that coveted 100% completion mark in both the console and handheld games.

SGR Grade: 4/5

Authors: Michael Knight & Nick von Esmarch
Publisher: Prima Games
Editions Available: Paperback
Acquired via Publisher