A Deep Dive into Roguelike Tedium?
Since the smash success of Vampire Survivors, publishers have been scrambling to get a piece of the pie. More often than not, their offerings are rushed, soulless, and capture very little of what made poncle’s classic so appealing.
After playing many of these half-baked rehashes, I was somewhat sceptical going into Submarine Survivor.
At first glance, Submarine Survivor looks like an underwater take on well-trodden ground. However, this little gem, whilst flawed, managed to subvert my expectations with its charming cast of submersibles and meaningful changes to the genre’s core structure. For a little while, at least.
Underwater Arsenal
In typical ‘Survivor’ fashion, the bulk of what you are going to be doing in any given play session is to move around a combat arena fighting enemies. The genre twist is that your control is very much locked to movement. Your weapons will fire at various intervals and it is up to you to position yourself in such a way that your array of armaments find their mark.
As you defeat the denizens of the depths, you will accumulate EXP shards that in turn increase your level. With each level-up comes new weapons and chipsets (these function as passives), further increasing your ability to slay jellyfish and the like.
A lot of the joy from Submarine Survivor comes from mixing and matching various weapons to make hilariously destructive builds, such as combining high-yield explosives, with balls of plasma, laser beams, and big-honking broadswords. It’s not necessarily all that thematic – bar the occasional harpoon or torpedo – but it is incredibly fun.
Five-Minute Dives
Each stint into the ocean will last five minutes, with the last minute or so being where things start to heat up – sometimes literally. If you die, it’s game over and you are booted back to the surface. If you manage to survive you can extend your time in the ocean for more rewards, stick around to mop up the remaining enemies, or just leave.
Throw in a variety of modifiers that mix up each dive, and you’ve got a surprising amount of gameplay variety crammed into a very small package.
The Tedious Current
This is where Submarine Survivor tries to differentiate itself from its contemporaries. Each dive will last five minutes, however, upon the successful completion of each dive you merely continue your ‘mission’, all your gathered equipment still intact. Your mission is to accumulate enough ‘Threat’ to challenge a major boss. This will take the successful completion of at least ten expeditions back-to-back. Provided you beat the boss at the end, you are heavily rewarded.
Unfortunately, this interesting deviation quickly devolves into tedium. This is largely down to the ludicrous amount of busywork Submarine Survivor expects you to partake in. You see, you don’t just collect EXP shards and build up your arsenal. No, you also collect six types of shells, five types of ore, blueprints, randomly generated items, and money.
All of this plays into a needlessly grindy meta-progression that frankly, could have been skipped. Clearly, it’s here to artificially prolong the game’s runtime with paper-thin progression, and sadly, it saps a lot of the fun out of the game. The main reason for this is that the majority of your individual dives end up being pointless.
The resources gained from each dive are fairly low – so low in fact that once you’ve invested about an hour into the game, you won’t be progressing much at all. The reason for this is that most of your rewards will come flooding in after you complete a full mission. To put into perspective, completing a mission on ‘hard’ rewarded me with quadruple the resources I had gathered throughout my entire playthrough up until that point.
Deep-Sea Dilemmas
Unfortunately, even with that massive injection of capital, I was unable to make much meaningful progress. There are dozens of stats, all of which are increased by near-imperceptible amounts and require a disgusting amount of resource investment to max out. Throw in randomly generated items to tweak your stats and to invest more resources into upgrades to your submarine that require even more loot, and the thing burned me out much faster than it would have if none of this existed.
It’s all just a tenuous veil to pad the game out in a thoroughly unpleasant way, and once I had gotten a few big wins, all the wind in my sails had well and truly died. Sure, it gives you something to work towards, but it does so in the least interesting way imaginable. The one redeeming element of this system is that the different submarines you unlock play very differently due to unique stat distributions and active abilities. I’d prefer not having to spend tens of thousands of blueprints per submarine to max them out, but a win is a win.
Submarine Survivor is also pleasing to the eye. It has a clean visual style with bright colours contrasted with the inky blackness of your enemies. Not only that but weapons are suitably bombastic and add enough flair to the proceedings to convince your brain that you are an immortal bullet-spewing titan of the sea. The game also has a colourblind mode, which is a welcome bit of accessibility.
A Flawed Gem in the Survivors-Like Ocean
Overall, Submarine Survivor is fine. It tries to mix things up beyond just adding superfluous visual elements, and in some cases, it succeeds. In others, it adds a brand of tedium that mires the whole experience in such a way that you won’t want to come back to it.
Important Links
Roguelike Shooter Submarine Survivor Surfaces on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch – https://www.thexboxhub.com/roguelike-shooter-submarine-survivor-surfaces-on-xbox-playstation-switch/
Buy Submarine Survivor on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/submarine-survivor/9NCBXZ2PVFL1/0010
