One disappointment is that Sea Dogs doesn't take place on Earth. Instead they made up a bunch of islands and called it “The Archipelago.” I can't think of any reason for them to do this, they have the French, Spanish, English and Dutch, why not their real colonies and the real islands? Why not the real history behind all this? The only answer I can think of is that they didn't want to be bound to real geography and history (and thus risk the wrath of Atlas and history book carrying Nazis). Anyway, I found that a small disappointment.
Controls are simple enough. The arrow keys or the left mouse button propel Nicholas forward in town. You can interact with people and pursue conversation trees to their conclusion. Ingeniously the first few townspeople you meet with explain how to do most everything, which makes up for the slim manual a bit. When aboard ship the WASD keys move the ship around, tacking with the wind. You can raise and lower sails to protect them from cannon fire or make good your escape. There are also four kinds of shot for your cannons and each has a different purpose. Plain cannonballs are good for distance, grape shot for raking crews and sails from the deck of the enemy ship, bombs for blowing holes in the hull and chain for disabling masts and sails. When you make contact with the ship (or it makes contact with you) you go to a sword fight screen where WASD lets you duel the enemy captain. This is an abstract for the entire boarding experience in that your “health” represents how many sailors you have still alive. If you block well enough you can keep your men alive and win the day, even if outmanned.
The problem is the town walking and running controls make for a lot of boring movement, and townspeople get in the way constantly. Ship movement is better but the game is very combat intensive and it gets old after a while. This spells doom for a vast RPG. The sword fighting controls are easy to learn but they needed a tutorial. Expect to die and reload often before you can call yourself a sword master. A simple ship-to-ship and sword fighting tutorial or random battle generator would solve a lot of these problems. Practice makes perfect and you shouldn't have to load a saved game or restart just to get that practice down.