Breakwaters - Review

Water physics. Water overflowing in the area. Water filling the depressions. Water pumped through pipes. Parting and undulating. This is the essence of Breakwaters. Impressive concept and it is a pity that for now, she is wearing what could be called "cheap Valheim in the Caribbean". I invite you to a story about breaking water and why I even play such games. H Why am I involved in such games? Because they interest me. I like well-made, high-budget production like most players, but it's hard to innovate there. And although the independent market has also broken down, it is filled to the brim with clones of popular productions, it is still among the so-called "Turkeys" which are fresh things. Besides, I'm so able to play a weak game if it has one fresh element that I like - one mechanic that takes the whole thing to a higher level - even if the rest of the production is pulling things down. And Breakwaters is such a production. For now, because it may change over time.

But let's start from the beginning. The misery is already visible when we create a character and it turns out that we only have a few elements of appearance to choose from, then we land on an island and some Ziutek has us pounding trees and bushes with his fists to build his first workshop consisting of branches, seagrass and, probably, saliva. Survival classics. The first thing that catches your eye here is placeholders, i.e. filling the so-called place-holders - temporary graphics that do not look final and are to be replaced someday. Here, the two-dimensional interface elements are especially scary, probably sketched by the seven-year-old nephew of one of the developers, and the budget for it was the fabulous amount of a pack of crayons and an expired sticker with the Batman logo with weathered glue. The resulting work includes options displayed on a translucent background, an interface made of ugly windows, and hapless object icons, some sketched in Paint or stolen from some mobile game. Ah, this beautiful sachet to carry items. And I like the bamboo armor, the icon of which in the inventory generates certain expectations, and the reality is what it is. Interestingly, the three-dimensional aspects of the graphics look much better and more coherent. And this concept art - for example, the one displayed when starting the game - looks almost baroque. I know that the equipment in the game will still be redesigned and that is why it was not profitable to push resources into nicer icons, but it bites a lot. But enough of worrying about the Breakwaters' early- availability. What can you do here? In theory, there is quite a lot of it. The huge ocean is covered with islets. You can build huts on them, gather resources, and use them to create several types of weapons and tools of increasing quality. We have to eat and drink regularly - whatever the problem is only at the very beginning because then food and water flow in a wide stream. We also build small ships and equip them with cannons, nicer chests, and cranes. On the beaches, we find bottles with treasure maps that can be dug up afterward. Chests can be fished from the bottom of the ocean, and the islands are prowled by animals, pirates with cockroach mentality, and some rock creatures or other golems throwing stones and making ass splashes with water. Well, there are even some houses or villages with eNPeCami who offer us tasks such as "bring me three bone armor" or "I'll buy fish in bunches of five from you", and they trade various goods, but all these tasks have the hallmarks of simple tutorials or fetch requests, so they're not very thrilling.

In addition, the texts are full of linguistic errors. The fight here is as simple as building a brick - we run and wave our weapons. There are no blocks, no dodges, or depth of any kind, but the opponents don't show too much initiative either. In general, the game seems too easy for me - I died just a few times at the beginning of the adventure, and mainly while checking if it was possible to hijack a pirate boat cruising on the ocean. You can't and it is haunted because it is an unmanned drone and it shoots everything that moves by itself. The overall goal of the game is to fight giant Titans that look like something escaped from Shadow of the Colossus. In the current version, there is one to defeat and it took me several hours to reach it and knock it down, but more on that later. Overall, you get the impression that the content here is not as little as for Early Access, but everything seems quite boring and futile, and sometimes downright tiring. We will come back to that too. But there is one aspect of water physics that makes the biggest difference. What does he look like? Pretty good. Water naturally overflows through objects, bursts into the beach and snatches objects, fills and is washed out of depressions, and flows down from the springs creating naturally meandering streams. The world is filled with blue crystals that generate water, and yellow ones that repel it. We can use the blue ones to make a magic bottle that will spit out a large bubble of liquid when broken. You can use it to dilute a jelly-like creature that is immune to ordinary weapons, or to pour water into some space away from the ocean - for example, to activate a pedestal showing the way to Titan, which acts on the water. A pedestal, not a Titan. Yellow crystals are found on bottoms and beaches - they repel water and create kind of pits in the oceans.

They can be used to make a bottle that will push the liquid away for a while or to produce quite useful lamps that divide the seas and oceans. They come in handy when you want to create a magical breakwater that will stop the tides from breaking inland, create a dry foot passage through the riverbed, or lead your people out of Egypt to the Promised Land. You can also build pipelines with pumps and pump water one way or the other. Well, there are even some water sensors here and you can connect pipes transmitting signals so that, for example, the pump turns off when the water in the water tank reaches a certain level. I tested it and it works. However, I have the impression that the game does not draw water from the place where you take it - I could use the pump to fill the tank I built myself, but when I turned its thrust, the water level in the improvised well did not drop. Maybe it's some optimization trick to keep the game from trying to calculate how much water is sucked out of the ocean, but the fact that I didn't manage to pump the water out of the tank let me down a bit. Nevertheless, the fluid simulation in Breakwaters is impressive. It's just… it doesn't apply to the game. Of course, we have a lot of interaction with water while playing - even while sailing - but being able to manipulate it doesn't have a deeper impact on completing objectives. Not available yet. Overall, Breakwaters seem to be two game ideas stuck together. On the one hand, we have water manipulation, which can be fun to play but has no purpose for that. On the other hand, we have a very classic survival game that was sloppily designed. Because this survival part works as it should, but when we take a closer look at it, nothing makes sense here in terms of design. Building houses is simple and functional, but the economy is idiotic. Walls can be made of readily available resources, but floors already require nails, and we need to collect and process less available ores to make these. I have not yet seen a cottage-building survival camp where the difference in the cost of a wall and a floor would be so great. What is he doing, these heated floors or what? The economy of the game is insanely easy to spoil.

The currency here is yellow crystals, but all you need to do is chop the easily available wood, turn it into planks, and then start selling them on pallets to a submarine trader, whom you summon with a flare to recover a sunken ship or be taken to a nearby island in case of disappearance in the middle the ocean. In a few moments, you can make a fortune by becoming a board baron. The kitchen allows you to cook various dishes, but it is a waste of time, because they have no special effects, and simply frying the meat spilling out of wild boar, crabs, and rats with a wide stream, also solves the problem of hunger. It seems that the creators want to have cooking in the game, but so far they have stuffed this space with some cotton and dirty rags to prevent the component from shaking while driving. Oh, remember that rat skins have to be thrown into the sea because they attract more rats. However, what probably spoiled my fun the most was the size of the ocean ... or rather how far apart the islands are. During my search for Titan, I went to a certain village several times and the sailing to it took about 5 minutes each time. 5 minutes of swimming forward. Doing pretty much anything. Sure, the fun is to be diversified somewhere by pirate ships and towers, but they are easy to avoid with an arc, and the fight makes little sense because cannonballs are hellishly expensive to produce and possible loot completely does not justify how much time you need to spend on collecting resources. What's more, you can not even, while sailing, calmly browse through Twitter, at the same time significantly increasing the risk of cancer after reading the next builders - cancer cells - news from the country and the world, because the wind direction changes now and then and you need to carefully turn the sail so as not to stop suddenly or fail at a snail's pace. I don't need to mention the fact that spinning the sail is not a very interesting game. So is Breakwaters futile? Not necessarily, because you can see some interesting elements, impressive solutions, and examples of how this technology can lead to a bit of emergent gameplay. Just playing with water is a bit of fun and there is potential for it. Parting rivers with lanterns to create a dry trail for some purpose is fun. When a hermit wanted 20 fish from me, and I couldn't find a fishing rod anywhere in the game, then - at the sight of a school of salmon - I threw a few bottles with yellow crystals into the water, and then I picked up the fish from the bottom that was temporarily deprived of water. The moving trees are somewhat surprising and disturbing. They move from time to time and slightly so you might miss it, but when you suddenly return to your hut and find it is surrounded by magical pines, it's weird.

The houses can be built not only on land but also by expanding special, floating platforms. I created such an architectural monster as a test, but the fact that it works and moves on wavy water is impressive and has potential. And the fight with Titan itself, which is something the game also advertises and reaching him forced me to spend more hours with her than planned, is interesting. Sure, it's just plain sailing around and avoiding the death rays crossing the water and firing special cannons, but if the developers create more diverse giants, it might be interesting. Of course, the skirmish was quite a pain, because the Titan ate cannonballs like stove peas in winter, so I had to stop this epic battle twice to feed the ammunition. The creature itself materializes in a stone cage that it cannot leave, but as it appeared surprisingly close to my main base, I had to move my port quickly after suddenly being within range of a stone giant breathing luminous death. This is an example of how game systems can interact with each other. How to sum it up? Well, Breakwaters has the potential, but it's one of those Early Accesses that's way too early right now. The game, built around interesting mechanisms, is a complete mess that seems to resemble something working, but nothing here is going to add up to the end. Worth watching? Surely. To buy? I think in a year or two at the earliest - if things develop sensibly. I don't regret playing, but it's way too early to play it.

ALL IMAGES ARE FROM - https://www.indiedb.com/games/breakwaters/images/image-10#imagebox