Tradewinds Legends is one of those games I'd rather be playing than reviewing. It's an addictive little sucker... If you haunt Yahoo Games, this might be a title you've seen before. Tradewinds Legends is a later incarnation because there were PC versions first, as is usually the case. The graphics for the download version on the Mac are excellent. Mostly sprite-based by the look of them with some nice effects to round out the scenery. The characters are well done, both for those you'll play and those you'll encounter in the game. There is some great dialogue in the game, which would be even better if it had been recorded as voice-acting. Maybe in the next version...

The world you explore is fairly static, since this is a game of building resources and moving from port to port with ships and goods. The occasional battle keeps things interesting with a change of scenery, but Tradewinds Legends doesn't dazzle with cut scenes and wild animation. Each port does feature its own design and the ships are designed differently to make your growing fleet look interesting on the horizon. There could have been more locations in the game or at least more attention paid to changing the scenery as you move through new towns and explore.

If you understand how to buy low and sell high, this game is for you. Tradewinds Legends doesn't try to be more than a great example of what capitalism has always espoused: building wealth. In the beginning of the game, you can choose between a game of pure commerce and a game where you get some story elements. The Free Trade Mode has no story and just allows you to jump in and start moving goods. This approaches a casual game in many ways. The Story Mode includes the same characters found in Free Trade, but you get to learn more about what is motivating each character and why they have a stake in the game. During the course of a Story Mode gaming experience, you get to partake in 100 distinct missions. Trading goods wouldn't seem to lend itself to a very rich storyline, but you'd be surprised. Running errands around the world actually starts to get pretty exciting... think Han Solo, Chewie, and the Falcon.

Traders and smugglers share some common ground, and there have to be merchants to actually buy all the stuff. Moneylenders, traditional bankers, boat-shop owners, and a whole host of other characters seem to show up in each town. Depending on the nature of your mission, you'll find each of these play some role during the story sequences. It may be they have a piece of information or an item that someone else wants to possess. In one mission, you find that the magical Djinn of one ruler has a crush on a Djinn in another town. Passing love notes between these two proves to be highly lucrative. Gather enough money and you can buy yourself a boat or two or ten. Outfit these boats with weapons and goods, then sail off to the nearest port to find good prices. If this all sounds shy of a full game, we can only say that you've been warned. Remember I mentioned the addictive part? Pretty soon, you'll start dreaming about the price of tea in Ak'Wah if you're not careful.

Too little challenge means one of two things. Either the game wasn't designed very well or you're playing a casual game. Since so much of Tradewinds Legends is designed well, I'm inclined to think that this is more of a casual game than anything else. It doesn't take any twitch reflexes to play and it doesn't take a huge amount of brain power, either. At first, I was writing down the price of everything, thinking I'd have to manage my resources all on my own. I started noticing that when I visited a port with cargo in my hold, there was a neat color-coding to show whether I had paid the same, less, or more for the goods. Owning a warehouse works the same way. You get a little "helper" feature that warns you when you'll be losing money and when you'll gain some. There are similar helper features such as a very full tutorial that pops up whenever you encounter something new. Turning it off is possible, but the idea of so much support in the game is indicative of the audience. Tradewinds Legends is a heck of a lot of fun, but a very lightweight gaming experience. Once you build up a fleet and have the money to maintain it, there isn't a force in the world that can present much challenge. More online play against real humans would address the difficulty gap. The closest thing to a gap in Tradewinds Legends is that there is always an item in the shop that you just quite can't afford. Keeps you hungry and on the road to that next big deal.

Setting up and running the game is easy as can be, with a download and license key arrangement. The game can actually be played online without any download, but the lack of features for the online version makes this inadvisable. Nice as a test, but nothing you'd want to spend a lot of time playing. The tutorial does a fantastic job of walking you through all the features of the interface and you'll learn all that you need to be successful as a benevolent trader or marauding buccaneer. I just made up that buccaneer part...

A great thing about Tradewinds Legends is how clean the interface actually looks. More shortcuts on the keyboard would have been nice, but there are a few shortcuts to simplify things. Some type of auto-save would also have improved the flow of the game. You can save in any port, but you're never quite sure where or why to save. In a few cases, there is a big build up to some battle, but things mostly roll at a steady pace throughout the game. It's possible to run in a windowed mode or in full screen and there wasn't any sign of slow down at any point. New locations load the first time and then don't seem to load again. The speed of the game is adjustable, but it moves at a nice clip that keeps things fresh.

A simple game can be powerful. Too many features and options tend to make a younger or novice gamer cringe. It may make sense to have a big bag of options for games that appeal to core gamers, but Tradewinds Legends is refreshing in that it is built to appeal to the widest possible group of players. Even the characters you choose to play are distributed pretty evenly between men and women. You could teach a kid something about saving and borrowing money with this game. I'm not saying its educational, but as a parent, I would rather have my kid playing this and using his noggin than shooting down ducks or collecting coins all day. More scale to the difficulty and a more robust option to play online against "real" opponents would make for a better gaming experience. As casual games go, it's fair to say that Tradewinds Legends is approaching perfection.