Rogue Waters Review: Tactical Fisticuffs on the High Seas

Rogue Waters Review

Hello player! Have you long dreamed of a game that would allow you to conquer the seven seas? Pirates are the coolest, but you don't see pirate games as often as you think. There are some high-profile AAA pirated games, but where are the weirder titles? Rogue Waters takes that pirate theme, throws it into a fun gameplay loop, and screams avast. We have a winner here friends!

man on the mizzen mast

Rogue Waters is a turn-based tactics game. The combat mechanics are simple and fights tend to get tiring. But the underlying mechanics are solid, and as a rogeulite, even failure means you're making progress. You start controlling a betrayed captain; This is all for revenge! Your rival captain takes on some strange magic and causes some sort of biblical flood/pirate apocalypse. So you are recruiting a brave team that will fight under your flag.

You navigate a map that will be familiar to anyone who has played a roguelike game since Slay the Spire. You start from the bottom and work your way up. Each node is connected by a path so you can plan your route in advance to maximize fighting or shopping or whatever your crew needs in this race. You collect cannons for your ship and items for your crew, expanding your options in combat.

Volley O'Guns

Before each fight, your ship will approach the target ship (or fort) and you will have 3 turns on your ship before swords are crossed. You use different weapons to deal different types of damage to the target, removing bonuses before the fight or even killing guys before they draw their sword (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 several members of your crew are at your command.

There are many little things that add up to a game that generates great sensations. At first I thought the relative simplicity and brevity of the ship approach was kind of a waste of time, but when I tried different options I found a much deeper system than it appears at first glance. Plus, three turns end in an instant so you don't spend a lot of time waiting for the action to start.

Rum bottles

Most of the combat involves pushing guys around, pushing them into obstacles, into each other, even into the salty depths. You can also navigate ropes hanging from rigging to move around the map with a bit of pirate rampage. There was another recent game that feels incredibly similar to playing (free), and that's Tactical Breach Wizards. In both games, you level up your guys by taking them through devious combat puzzles based primarily on positioning. I don't know if I'm ready to quit and Rogue Waters is definitely better than Tactical Breach Wizards… but I do know that that game left me wanting more. Well, here it is!

I've found that in games like this there is one important element that gets overlooked: animation! People will mention it for sure, but strong animation is what turns a checkers game into a dynamic video game that makes you feel like a complete badass. If your swords move cutting through everything as if it were air, the illusion that you are part of the crew is shattered. Rogue Waters doesn't even attempt realism (the enemy captain is a skeleton named Blackbone) but it captures the fantasy.

Release the Kraken

Here's a small but perfect example! When your pirate and an enemy pirate are adjacent, you are in critical danger and vulnerable to attacks of opportunity. How is this communicated to the player? The little pirates are side by side cutting each other's swords, from left to right, from left to right. It doesn't seem like a real fight at all. It looks like what you see when two little kids play pirates. Then the matches begin and your pirates move like they're in WWE. No one will get scurvy in this game and everyone looks like superheroes. The pirate fantasy lives on!

There are many roguelite games that crossover with a dozen other genres. Maybe your rogue capacity is filled to the brim and overflowing. That's pretty much what I was thinking when I sat down to play Rogue Waters. But it has enough originality to be appealing and is done 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 quick run of something that grabs your attention and hits hard. Rogue Waters will do it for you. And I hope that before we have a pirate masterpiece from Rockstar or Naughty Dog, we have a hundred more games with great ideas like Rogue Waters. There is room in the world of video games for someone to take a wild shot, and sometimes that shot hits the target.