Xbox Indie Game Review of Adrift – Does This Modern Take on Pirates Float Our Boat?

Developed by: Wicked Smiles Studios
Genre: Action & Adventure
Countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States
Price: 240 Microsoft Points (US $3.00)
Languages: English
Players 1-4, Co-op 2-4,
Features: HDTV 1080i, Custom Soundtracks

Developer Summary:

Adrift is an arcade style action oriented 3D game. Players control boats loaded with weapons and command a squad of ai assisted boats. The campaign tells a story of a young Somali pirates climb through the ranks of a deadly pirate organization based in the Gulf of Aden. Invite your friends to join you in co-op story play or fun packed party mode.

What we think:

Pirates of the So-mal-i-a…n….

When I think of a pirate game, some of the first things to come to mind are ummm…parrots…eye-patches…cannons…planks… swashbuckling, I could say more but I would only be serving to further the cliché. I guess what I’m getting at is there are very few games that have ever delved in to the more current pirate genre. Well Adrift is here and they’re swapping cannons for AK’s and planks for….. well… more AK’s.

You play as a nameless Somali pirate who is trying to shoot, steer, and steal his way up through the ranks of a powerful pirate organization who is currently at war with multiple other pirate organizations but mostly against those dogs the Gode (shakes fist in anger)….I honestly never knew that pirates were so organized, but I stand corrected. Along the way you encounter other characters who ask for your help as you amass stronger ships and raise your reputation.

But the question is, did I want to sail into the sunset, or throw myself overboard?

Rainbow Ships Ahoy!

On the surface (pun intended) this is a good looking indie game. The core graphical element and the environment that you spend all of your time navigating is the ocean, and Adrift does a fine job of recreating your watery warzone. A simple shimmering effect on the ocean’s surface as well as the appearance of a slight cloud-cover overhead help to give the ocean a sense of depth, and If you sit still long enough you can watch tiny ripples scatter about in the sun and your ships rise and fall with the tide. There’s also a nice variety of day-time/night-time missions and although the water is the exact same (just different color) in each setting, It’s a solid enough paint-job to make you feel like you’re in another location.

One slight graphical mis-step comes as your boats carve through the water, at first glance the wake that your cruisers create is well handled and it helps to bring about a sense of speed as the tide extends back further the faster you go, however at times while you’re not really moving, or are just circling about, giant blotches shoot out from your ship for no reason and it looks as though your vessel has been equipped with a Photoshop smudge tool.

However the rest of the game sees enough care in other aspects such as a variety of ships types in various colors, each, although simplistically modelled, are varied enough to do a good job of alerting you to what type of ship you’re commanding or consequently what type of enemy you are encountering. Textures are also solid on the boats, water, and even small islands that you come across. The mission briefings are also highlighted with some really well drawn character sketches.

Overall the game doesn’t have a stand-out artistic aesthetic, but the core mechanics are solid and do a good job of creating a consistent environment. My major gripe with the games presentation however is in the games audio.

Aflac, Poor Yorick:

I think what started as a minor irritation is slowly turning into a pet peeve for me, and that pet peeve is this: Even though people may have more access to Pro Tools and a microphone, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be voice acting your games especially when the voice acting is painful at best. This is unfortunately the case with Adrift. Each mission is briefed to you by one of three different voice acted characters; the bad-ass female pirate, the wise general, and of course… the fat crazy Russian…? Each one however sounds as though they are reading word for word from a script, complete with awkward pauses and fumbled words, leaving it somewhere below the original Resident Evil, without the campy horror value (No! Don’t open that door!). Don’t get me wrong, I like the ambition behind it all (and again I know it’s fun to hang out with buddies and read scripts), but if you are going to be selling your games to people, you should make sure that whatever you put into it is quality. The in-game voice clips were so bad they had me laughing at first, and then wanting to mute my TV shortly afterwards.

I think I can sum it up this way: I would rather read Hamlet in peace and quiet than have Gilbert Gottfried screech “Alas, poor Yorick” in my ear.  In short, there is no shame in using a scrolling text box.  I used to love old RPG’s simply because I could create what the characters sounded like in my own head and not have to cringe at the poorly delivered Japanese translations.

On the other hand, the in-game sound effects work fairly well , with a variety of boat sounds and water crashing to keep things lively out at sea. The gun sound-effect could be a little more convincing though, especially as you level up in weapons power, but for the most part the sound effects help to add a layer of immersion to the often pretty looking scenery. The music is also really well done and deserves a nod.

It’s a Pirates Life for Me… and Three Friends.

Apparently the life of a pirate is nothing if not dangerous. Adrift absolutely backs this theory up in it’s initially punishing difficulty level right out of the gate. Upon starting the game I found myself trying desperately to destroy enemy ships only to be sent plummeting down to Davy Jones’s locker time and time again. No matter what I did, whether it was trying to stay back and fire from a safe distance, or juke and jive with finesse around enemy ships, their sticktoitive, magnetized AI and higher powered weaponry always seemed about 20,000 leagues out of my reach.

The good thing about adrift however is you get to keep whatever loot you make after each run and in turn use this money to upgrade your fleet’s weaponry, speed and shields. As I was able to gradually beef up my ships offence and defence, encounters became less intimidating and much more fun. I found myself luring ships away from the stashes that they were guarding and into open waters where gun fights now became a test of skill and positioning. This is the ultimate compliment that I can give to its game play, where as in many top-down shooters the action just boils down to a chaotic fire-fest, I actually found myself trying to strategize my enemy encounters instead of just launching myself in all willy-nilly. As you become more and more powerful, you may find yourself taking on more and more opposing ships at once, however it’s never a good idea to just launch yourself into a full-fleet of angry Gode as you’ll more than likely find yourself bunking with the Edmund Fitzgerald.

There’s a healthy mixture of mission types in this game as well that range from simple loot and pillage runs, to defending your base from enemy onslaughts, to craft retrieval and escort missions. I found that each level did a good job of making me play the mission with slightly different tactics, with only the looting/pillaging and territory defence scenarios feeling vaguely familiar to each other and in turn repetitive. The big bonus to all this though is the ability to play any of the missions with up to 3 friends (quad split screen) or local multiplayer VS games.

At Least it’s not Water World.

Upon listening to the initial mission briefing, I feared the worst for this game. I almost didn’t want to give it a chance, however after trudging through the games frightfully difficult opening level and putting some time into the game play itself I grew accustomed to my new sea-legs. Though a few moments of repetitive game design, and the unfortunate use of voice acting made me, at times, want to abandon ship, the game play itself made it worth taking this skiff out to sea if only for a couple of hours.

Who knows?  Costner may have a script for this one yet.

Rating: