Rogue Waters Reviews

Its the pirate game I have wanted since sid meier did it back in the day

better than skullnbones

fun times

This is an okay game with the potential to be great. You have a turn-based game, inside of a rouge-lite, inside of a RPG. The turn-based mechanics are solid, nothing revolutionary and nothing bad about them. Good strategy and, while the undo button can cheese the game, it's helpful when I click the wrong button (which could be fixed with some UI changes). The rouge-lite is like any other rouge-lite. Chose your encounters, get rewards for each encounter to become stronger on your run. The RPG elements. I don't think it's supposed to be an RPG, but it feels like there is a minor RPG system there. It could also be just me wishing it was there. You have a main camp that serves as a place to upgrade your ship/abilities/crew/etc. This is the part of the game that I feel is lacking. I wish it were a little more in depth here. The highest rated equipment is worse than the gear you pick up in your run. Overall, I like the game, it kind of scratches an itch I've been missing since Black Flag (in an unexpected way), but doesn't quite fully get the itch. For a sequel, I would leave the combat and runs as they are, just add more to the main camp. Try to turn this game from a rouge-lite to an RPG with rouge-lite mechanics.

High waters never felt better than this masterpiece glasswork pistol shining over the the depth of its enjoyable gameplay!

Game is a lot of fun, if a bit short. The random nature of hiring crew mates make you very attached to the ones you spend time raising, and the tactical combat is fantastic.

I love pirates, I love sea-themed games, I like rogue-lites so I expected this game to be amazing, but it’s just good, nothing great. The story was okay, voice acting was good, the music meh, the gameplay was great but it kind of grown tedious with all the different phases of a single fight. Also one of the resources is highly more available than the other and there’s no sink for it, whereas the other one you always feel the need for and can never get enough. There were a few nice builds you could do here and there, or infinite combos with a weapon that allows you to attack again after a kill but it’s not too deep. Overall a nice game and worth the asking price. Overall Score 6.5/10.

Pros: Multiple battles for each attack. Boat attacks then the boarding attack, Cool items, Grumpy Loui, fun gameplay loop for the most part Cons: Game is short you can 100% in under 20 hours after that there really is no reason to play it until they add an endless or something, the special moves in the game I only used the first one since the other two had specific niche's that you would almost never hate to use. Overall: The game is funny and does not take itself too seriously. The fighting is fun and if you master it there is almost nothing the AI can really do. I have a total of 19 hours just about and for the price tag 20 dollars it was worth it at least for me. The combat does take a couple runs to get used to. The story is cool for being about tresure hunting pirates.

Not bad. Combat and overall gameplay concept has fairly good ideas, ones that I haven't seen at other places before. As an experienced player in these kind of games, I found the scaling somewhat problematic, early difficulties are too easy, while the hardest difficulty can be completed more often with luck via Blight effect on enemy than skill and thinking really. Also, if you run into the wrong ship, you are just done. Enjoyable gameplay hours are relatively short I think. In general, a good buy when on sale. If a sequel came out, I'd buy it.

Rogue Waters has good moments and shows potential, but the lack of game content drags it down. This clearly wants to be XCom with pirate themes, but falls short in every regard - the game plays like early access or technical demo, which shows the potential, but never becomes the "full game". Base building - there are 4 buildings in the base, and I've unlocked the second sea monster with no signs of there ever being more buildings or an expanded tech tree to unlock for future runs. Like others have said, after 10+ hours I've unlocked most upgrades, which kinda makes side missions useless. The XP and costs increase exponentially, to the point where it takes 19k xp to level a specialist, but an outstanding run on heroic2 may produce 5k xp. That's 4 runs to get one level for lackluster upgrades. The specialist classes are rather uninspiring, they mix 3 random talent trees, which are not entirely random. For example the musketeer can not get any toughness upgrades. So once I get specialists and do well on a run, there is no reason to rotate them by leaving them to heal wounds. This means every raid is the same. Where this game shows potential is in the ship to tactical combat transitions - there were tough fights where I had to sacrifice crew, modules and cannons to get through to tactical combat. This "barely getting through" is rewarding, as understanding the system and mechanics is what wins those fights. The AI in tactical combat is quite good - once tier 2 abilities are unlocked on enemies (such as armor debuff and push), the AI can stack enough damage to kill of a specialist character in one turn if I make mistake. But the naval AI is atrocious - it randomly picks targets without any clear strategy in mind - it rarely if ever "finishes off" a cannon or a module, leaving some with 1 hp, and wasting shots on another module that it will clearly not destroy outright. The enemy ship setup seems random and weird - I can't tell how it is related to the "stakes" of raids. I have seen ships with a single 0-5 damage gun. I've seen other ships with 5 guns. I've seen ships where I can ignore everything and just kill the 4 crew members with cannons without even going into tactical combat. After 10 + hours I still have trouble understanding what the "gold" is used for in raids - the ability to buy cannons comes really late, so most events that give you a choice of "rare cannon" or "150 gold" are useless. Wounds and wound healing is very poor - most events give wounds to "mates", simply because there is more of them than specialists, but the lone "temple" event also offers to heal a wound to a random crew mate, which most often is the mate. This means the "heal wounds" choice is also meaningless. So far I have seen 3 enemy factions with 2 tiers of abilities, with random modules on a ship buffing the enemy crew. There is not enough enemy variety to keep the game going into 40+ hours. (I remember how you were fighting sectoids and mutons for dozens of hours in XCom and that was fun).