Rogue Waters Review – High Seas Tactical Fisticuffs

Rogue Waters Review

Ahoy gamer! Have you long dreamed of a game that would let you conquer the seven seas? Pirates are the coolest, but you don’t see pirate games nearly as often as you would think. There are a few high profile AAA pirate games, but where are the stranger titles? Rogue Waters takes that pirate theme, sticks it in a fun gameplay loop, and shouts avast. We have a winner here folks!

Man the Mizenmast

Rogue Waters is a turn based tactics game. The combat mechanics are simple, and fights tend to run short. But the underlying mechanics are sound, and as a rogeulite, even failure means you are making progress. You start off controlling a betrayed captain; all of this is for revenge! Your rival captain gets his hands of some weird magic and causes something of a biblical flood/pirate apocalypse. So you are recruiting a plucky crew who will fight under your flag.

You navigate on a map that will look familiar to anyone who has played any roguelike game since Slay the Spire. You start on the bottom, make your way to the top. Each node is connected by a path so you can plan your route ahead of time to maximize fighting or shopping or whatever your crew needs on this run. You collect canons for your ship and items for your crew, which widens your options in combat.

Volley O’ Guns

Before each fight, your ship will approach the target ship (or fort) and you get 3 turns on your ship before swords get crossed. You use different guns to do different kinds of damage to the target, eliminating bonuses before the fight or even killing guys before they ever draw their blade (the enemy can do the same to you). Then your ships collide and you enter a more traditional turn-based fight on a grid, where multiple members of your crew are at your command.

There are lots of little things that add up into a great-feeling game. At first I thought the relative simplicity and brevity of the ship-approaching was sort of a waste of time, but as I tried different options I found a much deeper system than first appears. Plus three turns are over in a flash so you don’t spend long waiting for the action to hit.

Bottles ‘O Rum

Most of combat is about pushing guys- pushing them into obstacles, into each other, even off the side into the briny depths. You also can navigate ropes hanging from the rigging to warp around the map with some pirate razzmatazz. There was another recent game that feels incredibly similar to play (complimentary), and that is Tactical Breach Wizards. In both games you level up your guys as taking them through devious combat puzzles mostly based around positioning. I don’t know that I am prepared to come out and definitively Rogue Waters better than Tactical Breach Wizards… but I do know that game left me wanting more. Well, here it is!

I’ve found in games like this, there is one important element that goes overlooked- the animation! People will mention it sure, but strong animation is what turns a game of checkers into a dynamic video game that makes you feel like a total badass. If your swords swish around cutting everything like air, the illusion that you are part of the crew gets shattered. Rogue Waters isn’t even attempting realism (the enemy captain is a skeleton named Blackbone) but it captures the fantasy.

Release the Kraken

Here is a tiny, but perfect example! When your pirate and an enemy pirate are adjacent, you are critically threatened and vulnerable to attacks of opportunity. How is this communicated to the player? The little pirate dudes stand next to each other chopping at each others swords, left-right, left-right. It does not look like real fighting at all. It looks like what you see when two little kids play pirate. Then the fighting starts and your pirates move like they are in the WWE. No one will get scurvy in this game, and everyone looks like superheroes. The pirate fantasy is kept alive!

There are a lot of roguelite games, crossing over with a dozen other genres. Maybe your rogue capacity is filled to the brim and spilling over. That’s kind of what I was thinking when I sat down to play Rogue Waters. But then it has enough originality to be engaging, and it’s made well enough to be fun! This isn’t the holistic pirate game of my imagination, but sometimes you don’t want to play Red Read Redemption, you want to play a fast run of something that holds your attention and hits hard. Rogue Waters will do that for you. And I hope before we get a Rockstar or Naughty Dog pirate magnum opus, we get a hundred more games with cool ideas like Rogue Waters. There’s room in the world of gaming for someone to take a wild shot, and sometimes that shot hits its target.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***