Good ideas, poor results.
The controls are ok but not without their flaws. When trying to anchor and board land to find treasure, it is almost impossible to not ram your ship into shore before the anchor button pops up. The wind is also annoying, I know it would be un realistic without it, but for most of the time I've been playing the wind has been almost exclusively eastbound. Making it very hard to travel anywhere, and making fights very annoying. I can't remember how many times I have had to give up trying to board a surrendered enemy ship that had no sails, but I couldn't get to it because it was down wind and I just end up shooting it till it sank. I don't see the point of having more than one ship. The only thing that It helps with is having more space to hold stuff, which is usually food that is used to feed the extra crew on the extra ships. You can only take one ship into battle, meaning you could have hundreds of spare cannons, a bunch of warships in your fleet, but you would still be fighting as if you had one. The minigames are annoying. The swordfighting one sucks it is way too easy just use the rapier and mash attacks. The dancing one is annoying because you have to sometimes do more than one of the same move and it is hard to tell when you need to press it again and you end up pressing it too many times. Basically, the lack of diversity between the factions or cities and the lack of consequences for actions against allies make the game feel shallow.