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I am a sucker for Turn Based combat. As long as I am forced to think my way to victory without having to completely optimize every part of the gameplay, I usually end up loving any game that has this type of fighting system. Rogue Waters is a Turn Based Roguelite where you play as Captain Cutter, an immortal pirate with the ability to control powerful sea creatures. Think a combination between Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones. You have Davy Jones’ powers and immortal crew, but Sparrow’s semi-good guy vibes.
The game starts off fairly aggressively by directly showing off the roguelite mode that you’ll face 99% of the playthrough, but by throwing you into a story you know nothing about. If you’re someone that really enjoys stories, then this start can be a bit disappointing, as the whole premise and the plot of the game is a fairly rushed experience where you just have to accept the situation quickly and move on. It feels like they had a really good game on their hands, gameplay-wise, and improvised a bit on the story part.
The gameplay loop goes like this: you select a mission, where you see beforehand the types of enemies and the general difficulty of the challenge. After that, you’ll control your ship through a Raid. A Raid is just a normal dungeon, as most Roguelite players have probably seen in these types of games, where you select which ship you want to fight or what random event you want to face during each turn. You can already see all the paths where you can go from the start, which allows the player to plan their moves based on their luck and performance.
Your goal is to reach the final battle and conquer the fort to gain a lot of loot. The point of the process is to gain a lot of loot to upgrade your ship, get new equipment, and level up your crew to fight better the next time you go through a Raid.
The best part about this game are the battles. A naval battle starts by going through a three-turn stage where you can use your Action Points to attack the enemy ship with your cannons. There’s a lot of planning that goes into these fights and I’ve noticed after a couple of hours of playing that the ship is actually the most important part of a Raid. In the naval battle, you can choose to shoot either the enemy cannons, their modules (crew upgrades), or their crew. After the naval battle is done, your crew will board the ship and fight the remaining crew with their swords and guns.
During the naval battle, you will often have to choose what is more important: keeping your crew and modules safe from enemy cannons, or destroying the enemy crew before the fight. Getting rid of the enemy’s more powerful crew members during this phase can make the boarding phase a lot easier and better for your crew’s health. However, there usually is no chance to destroy both the enemy cannons, alongside their crew and modules. So, in this part, the player will have to go through a lot of planning based on what the enemy ship has on it. This is probably my favorite part, as I feel this part is the one that requires the most strategizing beforehand. If you’re like me, you’ll likely hunt for ship parts and cannons like a beast during each Raid, just to make sure you always have the advantage in naval battles. Otherwise, the enemy might get the upper hand.
Once you’ve shot your cannons three turns, you’ll select where you want to deploy your troops on the enemy ship. During this phase you’ll need to defeat all enemy troops and make them fear you enough to surrender. The combat is basic tactical turn-based with a lot of environmental usage. Besides normal attacks, your main way of dealing damage in Rogue Waters is to push enemies into things. Be it walls, spikes, or other enemies, you deal more damage by making sure your enemies hit something after you push them. Because almost all attacks in the game push enemies. At first I found this mechanic a bit annoying, as I felt I was often taken by surprise with an insta kill from my enemies because I positioned my crew wrongly, but I’ve come to realize that this is actually a really good combat system.
The battles feel a lot like a chess match, as you can easily lose one of your crew members if you don’t plan your moves accordingly. If you take the risk just to jump in and deal a lot of damage, you will often risk getting pinned in a corner and losing massive health from a single attack. Luckily, during your turn, you can always undo. Which is something not all turn based games allow you to do and it is a gift from the heavens. Because I often send someone in the wrong place and immediately realize I don’t like the results of my movement. Luckily, I can always press the Undo button to change the movement I went for so eagerly.
Once the Raid is done, you’ll see the amount of XP and money you get, and then you can level up your crew, get new skills or improve the ones you already got, then make the ship a lot better and maybe even recruit new pirates, while letting some of the injured ones rest in between Raids.
The gameplay loop is very entertaining and you get to upgrade your crew and ship after every Raid, making you feel like you’ve truly progressed and become more powerful than the previous run. As someone that loves Roguelites, I can certainly say that I’ll likely spend many more hours playing Rogue Waters.
In terms of graphics, the game looks really well, and you can likely see this from all the nice screenshots I took. The design of the characters is really interesting and it really works with the game. There are times when I feel the designs can be a bit childish, which is also something I feel with the story, but it isn’t really something that takes away from the experience.
When it comes to performance, the game can be run easily on most PCs. I tested the game on a weaker build with the highest graphics and didn’t notice any FPS drops. I’ve also not noticed any sort of bugs in over 20 hours of gameplay. The game runs smoothly and will work even on a potato computer. Here’re the minimum requirements:
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64bit
- Processor: 4-Core Processor (4 CPUs) 2.5 Ghz 64bit Intel Core i5-4690T 2.5 GHz || AMD Phenom X4 9850 2,5 GHz
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 || Radeon RX 560
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 12 GB available space
Rogue Waters
Bottom Line
Rogue Waters is a fun turn-based roguelite with satisfying progression and entertaining combat, with weak storytelling that won't really help in keeping players that don't like the gameplay loop engrossed.
