One of the most popular video game genres in the indie space these days is the “rogue-lite”. These games are typically built around replaying levels multiple times with a number of randomized aspects such as enemy types, equipment, abilities, and so forth in order to keep each “run” feeling fresh (think games like Hades or Rogue Legacy). Ship of Fools is a charming rogue-lite action game with a focus on cooperative play that offers a couple of twists on the genre as well as a few disappointments.
Developed by Fika Productions and published by Team 17, Ship of Fools sees a group of dimwitted fish people attempt to fight back against nightmares of the deep in order to quell an evil storm that has been brewing off the coast of the island they call home. There is a little bit of backstory that fleshes out some of the items and characters you will be interacting with frequently, but there isn’t much of a story in Ship of Fools. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, playing co-op games has a tendency to prevent players from paying close attention to cutscenes or story-specific dialogue. Because the story is so minimal, what’s there unfortunately doesn’t leave much of an impact outside of a few light-hearted jokes.
Ship of Fools has hand-drawn visuals and a fluid animation style that ends up looking great in motion. Going along with its sea-faring theme, the game uses a range of colors but primarily plays with shades of blue and green throughout which lend themselves well to establishing a distinct feel for each main area in the game. The enemies all have unique designs and variations that make them stand apart from each other, especially helpful during hectic combat encounters. Despite there not being much kinetic movement on the screen, everything looks and feels great. While the game’s visuals are unique, similar to the story lacking much of an impact, the visuals aren’t exactly memorable. Take the playable characters for example. Upon reflection, I remember the gameplay implications and abilities of the characters more than I do their name or any outfit design they may have had. Battle screens are similarly minimal in detail so while they look nice, it just doesn’t stick in the mind much after playing. What does leave more of an impact is the gameplay.
I should preface this portion of the review by stating that I played Ship of Fools by myself without a co-op partner, which is an important distinction to make when talking about the gameplay. Ship of Fools is designed first and foremost with co-op as the intended experience. This is reflected in the game in a number of ways, from having two selectable characters on the main menu before loading in, to the number of enemies and tasks you will have to work around during a given run. The game’s marketing also emphasizes co-op play. While solo play is an option, the game seemingly does not balance this change very well. The game features online play, but only with friends that also have a copy of the game, there is no online matchmaking at the time of writing this review. So, unfortunately, I was without a partner. I will expand more on this throughout the review, but this game is likely best enjoyed with another player if you have the option.
The gameplay loop in Ship of Fools brings some unique twists to the rogue-lite table. You begin by choosing a playable character. Controlling your character is simple, you move around, you have a roll used for dodging incoming attacks, and you have a melee weapon. In addition, each character also has a unique trinket that will enhance their abilities in some way. For example: the character I used the most had increased projectile speed and damage when using cannons. While picking a character is an important part of starting any run, unlike more traditional roguelites, your character isn’t the thing you are trying to upgrade and safeguard. It’s your ship.
The titular “ship” in Ship of Fools is where the bulk of the gameplay in a run takes place and what most of the mechanics revolve around. At the beginning of the game, the ship has a small amount of health, two “cargo” holding pads, and four spots to place a cannon. Each player gets to bring a cannon on board of which there are a couple different types including a standard single-shot cannon, a spread shot, a twin barrel and others, all of which can be upgraded over the course of the game. Players need to physically pick up and place their cannon onto opposite sides of the ship on the fly in order to address any threats that pop up. You need to manually load your cannon with ammo in order to use it. If you are playing solo like I was, the game gives you a second cannon that fires on its own, which is better than nothing, but is hardly a substitute for another real player. Sometimes the auto-cannon doesn’t react fast enough to or prioritize the most imminent threats, it’s stuck as the standard single-shot cannon, and you still have to manually load it with ammo just like your own cannon. So you as a solo player are responsible for making sure two cannons are being fully utilized rather than just your own.
There are several different types of ammo and trinkets you can come across out on the waves, ammo that gives fire or ice damage, trinkets that might augment your attacks, or powerful explosive rounds are just some of the types of loot you will discover. Cannons also can be loaded with harpoons, which can be used to reel in any items or money that may be floating next to your ship. Discovering what items pair well together and building out your ship over many runs remains a fun and strategic loop that continues to expand over several hours spent playing the game.
Cargo in Ship of Fools comes in many forms from the ammo types listed above, to statues that augment and bestow new abilities to your ship during your current run. These statues cover a wide range of areas, like giving the last loaded round of your cannon a guaranteed critical hit or gaining double the amount of money you find as well as giving your cannon shots a suite of elemental effects. Whenever your ship takes damage, you will need some spare wood planks in order to patch any holes, which can be found and stored on your ship as cargo. Both the ship’s health and its number of cargo spots can be upgraded permanently throughout the game. Any cargo on your ship that is not placed on a cargo spot will be thrown overboard when you attempt to move on from your current location. Figuring out what kind of “ship build” you want to pursue, as well as choosing what cargo to bring aboard and what to leave behind will have you making plenty of tough decisions. You will often be juggling the placement of your cargo as well, such as having spare wood planks located near damage holes for quick healing in an emergency or having ammo crates positioned nearby your cannons for fast reloading. There are plenty of cargo items that feel like important upgrades, which makes the decision-making that much harder.
One thing I would have liked to see in regards to the cargo that isn’t present is some kind of menu that describes what each item does after you have picked it up for the first time. The game will offer moments where you need to choose between certain items without offering any sort of descriptions of what the items do. While it may be intentionally vague, and it offers a greater feeling of mystery at the beginning of the game, it ends up being a little frustrating that there is no way to reference what items exist when you are trying to plan a specific build for your ship.
Combat is engaged in two main ways, melee combat on the deck of the ship, and firing cannons at enemies surrounding the ship. Each of the playable characters has a different “paddle” combo they have at their disposal which determines how fast they can attack or how much damage they deal. Players need to use their paddle to kill or knock off any enemies that jump aboard or put out any fires that might build up over time. You can also charge your paddle up in order to deal more damage or hit an incoming projectile away like a baseball. Certain enemies and environment objects can fire a blast that will temporarily freeze your character in their tracks which you need to dodge roll through to avoid. And sometimes enemies will rush to the sides of the ship and will need to be smacked away in order to avoid taking a hit. By and large, the melee combat on the ship is simple but feels good to play with thanks to some satisfying sound design and attack animations. The dodge roll takes some getting used to but once you have it down it becomes an incredibly helpful tool in your arsenal.
The cannon combat is a bit trickier to tackle. After you have loaded your cannon, you need to interact with it by pressing a button to start using it. While interacting with a cannon, you get a little view cone to aid in aiming your shots. When you want to stop using the cannon, you have to step away from it to regain control of your character. This led to some complications and clunkiness when trying to interface with the cannons. There were several times when I would accidentally pick up the cannon when I didn’t want to or would try to quickly leave the cannon to address another enemy and would get stuck because I didn’t back off of it the exact way the game wanted. Another bit of weirdness regarding the cannons stems from the camera perspective of the game. Ship of Fools is a 2D game, but the perspective view during gameplay is also blended with a skewed top-down angle so players can see all the items and actions on the ship’s deck. Due to this perspective, when trying to use harpoons to reel in loot from the water or lining up distant shots, I would occasionally miss my shots even though they appeared to be lined up properly. When the cannons are working as intended and you are interacting with them properly, like the melee combat they are a lot of fun. The fun is expanded when you start getting to play with different cannon types and the different ammo types that change how you adapt to each fight. And like melee combat, the sound design does a lot of heavy lifting to help the cannons feel powerful. The subtle clunkiness of the cannons unfortunately leads to some frustrating instances where it feels like you are fighting the controls more than the enemies attacking your boat.
While the combat is fun and engaging with room for experimentation, it’s also where the focus on co-op play becomes the most apparent. Playing alone early on in the game felt pretty overwhelming. The game throws a lot of enemies at you, and there is a lot of juggling different bits of equipment and game mechanics in order to put up a good fight. Seeing as I have experience playing other games in this genre, I chalked it up to my not being familiar enough with the game yet, and that I would get better at managing these threats as I learned the systems better. But even after putting a couple of hours into the game, it felt like some fights were simply just too much for a solo player to handle on their own. Because of all the onscreen action, at times it became hard to see where my character was even located in all the commotion, between trying to stop all the enemies, dodging incoming attacks, hit effects from the boat taking damage, getting frozen in place, and so on. I think if the game pulled back on the number of enemies it spawns in or makes the autocannon a bit more self-reliant and smarter at detecting the threats when playing solo, many of these frustrations could be alleviated. And again, while I didn’t play it in co-op, I can imagine having way less of a hard time if I had another real player to help tackle these issues with. So should you have another person playing with you, you may not have as nearly as hard a time that I had with the combat. It was only on a run where I was lucky enough to get access to a lot of health for my ship and stacked multiple high damaging buffs for my cannons that I was able to finish a run, which in the end felt more like a lucky victory than I had developed my skills and overcame the game’s challenges.
A full run in Ship of Fools spans four areas; The Forgotten Waters, The High Seas, The Edge, and The Darkness. Each area has its own visual aesthetic and music that make them stand out from each other, which is good to see as you might not think there would be many different ways you can make open ocean look interesting. The music deserves special praise, it’s subtle but fits the almost sea-shanty vibe the game’s visuals attempt to elicit. I particularly enjoyed the “Frozen Assets” track which is used in the ice-themed area. From a music and audio standpoint, the game sounds great.
As you load into the first area and approach the wheel at the front of the ship, you will be presented with a map with various icons spread out over a hexagonal grid and an ominous-looking black wall on the right side. After surveying the map, you get to decide which adjacent hexagonal tile you want to move your ship to, whichever icon that tile has on it determines what type of potential loot you might expect. If a tile is empty, it will usually be a fight with some enemies and no guaranteed loot. If you move to an icon with a treasure chest, it will be a small island with a chest containing an unlockable trinket or cargo item. You can find other NPCs, additional playable characters, armor to improve your ship’s health, money, harpoons, additional currency used for permanent upgrades, and many other things. However, movement comes at a cost. Once you commit to a certain direction, other paths may become unavailable, so you need to be mindful while making decisions about what items you want to prioritize for your ship. For example, it might be in your best interest if you have taken a couple of hits in your last battle to go to a tile that will give you wood planks in order to heal vs. going to one that will give you more money. Remember the imposing black wall I mentioned earlier? Well as you progress forward, every three turns the black wall will expand to other nearby tiles, consuming whatever items may have been available to you. When you come in contact with the wall, it will begin a fight with that area’s boss enemy.
Just like the decisions you make in regard to building up your ship, you will constantly be making tough decisions about which directions you should be going in order to take advantage of as many possible upgrades and loot as possible before fighting the boss at the end. And similar to my desire to have access to an in-game menu to be able to reference item abilities, I wish there was a legend on the map that specifically labeled each icon on the map. Seeing as there is so much importance placed on decision-making, having these tools to eliminate any poor decisions made purely because something wasn’t clearly stated would be an improvement to the overall enjoyment of making these important decisions.
As mentioned above, boss fights in Ship of Fools are a test of might and situational awareness. There are 4 main bosses in the game and they will always appear in the same area. These bosses typically have a lot of health and will use different strategies to try and take you out, from using several attacks or spawning large groups of enemies to try and overwhelm you. If you have a well-established build for your ship going, these fights feel like the best fights in the game, as they should. However, these fights do specifically feel tailored to having two real players on the sticks. As a result of this, there were several times when I, playing solo, became overwhelmed and felt like I just could not address the amount of pressing complications, or the fight would take an extra long time to complete because I couldn’t get into a groove with the combat. Between attacks happening on opposite sides of the ship, a handful of enemies charging up attacks all over the deck, and my automated cannon running out of ammo, there came times when it felt like taking damage was unavoidable. There were even instances where taking damage was completely unavoidable, specifically in the first boss fight with a giant squid. Part of the battle sees tentacles come in close and wind up for a swing. You have to hit tentacles away from the ship with your paddle, but once a certain level of damage is dealt to the boss, the fight transitions as the body of the squid rises up from the deep. There were times during this transition when the tentacles would not take damage from my paddle anymore, but would still deal a damaging blow to the ship if they were in the middle of charging up an attack. So while these fights were some of the most engaging and fun challenges to go up against, there were aspects of their design and implementation that made for some frustrating encounters.
Should you fail or succeed during a run, you will wash up on the shore of The Great Lighthouse, which serves as your home base of sorts. Here you can use currency gained during a run on permanent upgrades to your ship and cannons, as well as purchase new items that can be discovered during future runs. The Great Lighthouse is also a hub for all the characters you come across throughout the game. Once you have spent your currency and switched up any characters you wish to play as, it’s off on another excursion. While there are characters to talk to on the island, the dialogue is kept very minimal. The island is fairly small in size, as there’s not much to really explore, but it’s always satisfying to discover a new character out on the waves that return to the island and open up a new shop that you can interact with.
Despite how these frustrations and disappointments sound written out like this, in actuality they end up feeling rather small when compared to how fun Ship of Fools is at a base level. As a rogue-lite, it contributes some interesting twists to the formula, and the number of randomized factors feels just right in making sure that each run remains engaging. I played for between 8 and 10 hours and I was never bored with what I was doing. And I certainly felt the itch of “just one more” gnawing at the back of my head every time a run ended, the true mark of a fun rouge-lite. I never experienced any performance issues or crashes while playing on PS5, the only glitch I ran into was a trophy for beating the first boss never unlocked so if you are serious about hunting for trophies, beware. It may not change the world, but for $15, there’s a simple, fun, and engaging little sea-faring adventure to be had with pal.
