If there’s one thing I love, it’s managing a scurvy crew. Football Manager, for example, is one of my favorite series, and nobody has more scurvy than a bunch of English soccer players except, of course, pirates. Rogue Waters presents the familiar roguelike formula of semi-random gameplay with pirate flavored combat and ship and crew management. Yarr harr fiddle dee dee, killing my crew because I’m stupid is alright with me…
Rogue Waters
Developer: Ice Code Games
Price: $29.99
Platform: PC (reviewed), PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
Immortality, Betrayal, and High Seas Adventure
The framing story has your pirate captain finding a strange artifact that is possessed by some kind of g-g-g-g-ghost! This ghost is pretty talkative but you don’t exactly have a lot of conversations before you’re betrayed and left for dead for, oh, let’s say a decade. Fortunately, you wash up at your crew’s hideout all those years later, very much not dead. It turns out, you’re immortal and so is your pirate crew. This is a pretty handy development for the notoriously violent career of a pirate.
The hideout is where the journey begins: You upgrade your ship and various abilities–from being able to call The Kraken to how many crew you can command–as well as your crew and their abilities. You can also let them rest, recruit new crew, upgrade and change your ship’s equipment, and otherwise get ready to sail the seas.
Once it’s time to hoist the black flag, there’s usually a choice of three missions. Some are story related, they may be short or long, and they have a range of difficulties. Generally, you have an idea of what you’re sailing into. Like Sailing by Christopher Cross, it’s usually a lot of carnage and violence.
Setting Sail – Crew and Ship Management
The overall format is pretty familiar: There are various nodes and a semblance of choice along the journey once you embark. These can be: Fights of various difficulties against foes that offer loot; random events where good or bad things may happen; merchants and other upgrade opportunities, although since you are pirates, sometimes you can start shit with the merchants and take their stuff, although this can have Consequences(™), and various Interesting Surprises. Picking one branch of the journey means you miss out on other branches. Heals are pretty limited, so planning your route, min-maxing your upgrades, deciding when to push for more loot and experience, and when to pick an easy fight or avoid a fight entirely are the core strategic aspects of gameplay.
The combat has a twist in this one: You’re pirates, obviously, so you go ship-to-ship but really you want to get aboard their ship (it’s usually ships, sometimes it’s forts, but the same basic gameplay applies). This phase lasts 3 rounds. Your ship’s cannons (all of which can be changed out and upgraded) can target the other ship’s cannons (making it harder to blow up stuff on your ship), ship modules (which provide upgrades and bonuses to the crew), or the crew itself (making the actual fight easier). They, naturally, will be making the same choices.
The resource limitation is command points, meaning you can only fire so many rounds per…uh, round. More powerful cannons may eat up more Command Points or take a few turns to get online. Here again, we have choices: Take out their cannons so they can’t break your stuff versus take out their modules to make the overall fight easier versus take out their crew so the actual hand-to-hand phase is easier.
Repetitive Waves – Where Rogue Waters Falters
After three rounds, your picked crew swings over for the hand-to-hand phase on the other ship’s deck, which is turn-based, tactical combat…but even then, everything isn’t as simple as it seems. The basic attack is “stab them with a cutlass”, and there’s a fair bit of that. But some of your crew and some guys do ranged attacks. Some have pistols. There’s a little bit of magic. There’s a “fear’ component where if you do enough brutal kills, they’ll just surrender. There are environmental hazards like the ship’s deck being on fire or attacking and just knocking the other guys overboard. There’s calling The Kraken to crush them with a tentacle. There’s physically shoving them around. There are buffs, armor, and bonus damage. Being a pirate is pretty complicated when you get down to it and, since it’s a roguelike, you’re going to lose a lot, especially in the boss battles, until you level up and get some good gear.
Rogue Waters has been out on PC for a while and is new to consoles and feels like a very good console or Steam Deck game: Sit back, chill, kill some pirates, grind, and level up, turn off brain. It’s not hard to grasp the mechanics, but it also doesn’t take a lot of thought, and if you lose, you still get the experience and loot you earned and pop back up alive at your hideout. There is a “wounds” mechanic to your crew where they need to rest, so you’ll have to do some roster management, but eventually, you’ll recruit enough people to run a couple of different teams and it’s not all that hard. Likewise, the story and events are pretty predictable and after a while, you’re not going to run into many surprises.
Overall, it’s very satisfactory, but the downside is the power curve feels pretty flat and it gets pretty repetitive. Level ups, new skills, and improved equipment don’t feel that much cooler, making it feel more like one of those RPGs where you have to grind and grind and grind to get better over time, and it’s not like Slay the Spire where interesting new mechanics or story or gameplay options unlock as you do it. It’s pretty much just unlocking stuff to make numbers go up, which has its place.
The Final Word
Rogue Waters delivers an enjoyable mix of tactical ship combat and crew management with fun roguelike elements. However, its repetitive gameplay, predictable story beats, and flat progression system prevent it from being truly great. It’s a solid game for casual roguelike fans and pirate enthusiasts but lacks the depth and variety to keep players fully engaged long-term.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
