Review: WAVE BREAK Throws Players In Headfirst And Hopes They Can Swim
Years ago, games like Skate and Tony Hawk ProSkater, and SSX were hugely popular with lots of fun and crazy tricks, great environments, and lots of cool content. Wavebreak brings the fun and craziness of those games to the water while you ride on a boat and do crazy stunts and jump off giant ramps. As much content as there is and as much fun as it is to see cartoon animals do flips with boats and shoot each other, the baseline gameplay and progression systems aren’t well balanced or refined.
There is a lot to do in this game, there’s a pretty good-sized campaign, lots of great challenges in each level and cool unlockables to be purchased with in-game money. All characters start at a baseline of stats and then can be upgraded as players fulfill challenges throughout the campaign. However, I found it fairly difficult to progress at a reasonable rate. The stats of the character seems so low that it was difficult to do a lot of the objectives with some being clearly impossible to do until stats greatly improved. It’s great to have progression in a game, but when moving onto the second level of the campaign requires intense grinding and or extreme skill right out of the gate, it just doesn’t feel fun to play. Another issue when playing the campaign is that each round is only two minutes long and then a player has to start their run again. This is a really short amount of time to do very much in the game. To get the collectible items without knowing where they are, and even with knowing where they are, it is unreasonably difficult in the just first level and gets more difficult later. I understand wanting to make things challenging, but there has to be some reasonable progression.
The multiplayer modes have a lot of diversity, but it’s near impossible to find anybody online to play with. This might change after a week of being online with more people purchasing the game, but the small population will hold back players from really enjoying the multiplayer modes at all. Players can set up rooms and games by themselves playing against computers. This is a good way to get to know the multiplayer modes and earn some in-game money to upgrade and customize your character. If players are stuck in the campaign, they can go and grind out a bunch of multiplayer games to increase their stats. But having to earn in-game money in the multiplayer mode to progress the campaign feels odd and poorly thought out. I understand that doing this can help encourage players to play different modes, but players should be able to enjoy just the campaign or just the multiplayer mode without having to be forced to do one or the other in order to make any real progression.
Lastly, We need to address the core gameplay and feel of the game in general. As much fun as it is to jump up in the air and do bunches of tricks and continue combos, I found movement and trick inputs to be very simple, yet not very rewarding or refined. While driving around, my character would frequently get stuck on geometry and losing a few seconds here or there isn’t normally a big thing, but it is when the run is only two minutes long. Even though I am able to steer past all these things as I spend more time in the game, the map layout lends itself to players running into objects, under ramps and rails, and then being stuck inside of them or between them far too often and for too long. This is a problem that comes with an odd map layout and the awkward camera along with the movement speed feeling too fast and too slow at times. It overall feels like the game is more of a nuisance than entertaining.
Wavebreak has a lot of great ideas and is really interesting. I’m impressed with the amount of content that is in the game. But the core mechanics and the progression system through the campaign is not well tested or made. Even accounting for my possible/probable lack of skill, the level layout, campaign progression, and loose multiplayer will make it difficult to keep this game afloat and keep players interested. If you absolutely love skateboarding games and want to try something new while challenging yourself, this game might be for you, but otherwise, there’s little here to recommend as of now.
