Aqua Lungers Review
DISCLAIMER: I received this game for free from the developer. I don’t think that fact affects my opinion of the game, but it would be irresponsible of me not to tell you.
Like many of you, I’m starting to miss hanging out with my friends. Don’t worry, I’m not going to break quarantine, but I’m starting to feel like a runner, tensing up as I wait for the starting pistol to fire. Once I finally do get the all-clear to leave my apartment, I think I will probably sprint to a friend’s house, carrying a duffel bag of board games and my Switch. In the mean time, I’m building a catalog of games, both video and tabletop, that I want to play with my friends once the pandemic has been handled. This week, a game called Aqua Lungers was released on the Switch that aimed to be on that list so I decided to take a look.
Aqua Lungers is a game about one to four daring deep-sea salvage divers attempting to retrieve sunken treasure in a variety of dangerous locations. Each player controls one of these divers and has to work to score points faster than both the other divers as well as the boss monster ruling over each stage. This can be done in three different ways: Players can dive into the dangerous depths and retrieve treasure from sunken shipwrecks, kill the various non-boss monsters populating the level, or attack fellow players to steal the treasure they retrieved for themselves. However, a player’s haul doesn’t add to their points total until they return to base camp and deposit it into their personal treasure chest. Once one player, or in embarrassing cases the boss monster, reaches or exceeds 3000 points the round is over and players move on to the next stage, except of course when the boss monster wins in which case players get to start blaming each other for the failure before trying again.
I don’t know that I’ve ever played a game like Aqua Lungers before, which is a big problem because the game doesn’t do a great job of explaining much beyond the basic controls and objectives. The chief way this hurt my experience with the game was that there was no explanation for the power-ups players could find in each level. When retrieved, each power-up is presented as a simple icon, such as a diver’s silhouette set against a golden disk or a red ring with speed lines around it. Because there’s no tutorial on these, I was always stuck with using a power-up to learn anything about it, which resulted in my death at least three times. Some are easy to understand, such as the bomb which has an icon of a bundle of dynamite wired to a timer, but others are less intelligible, like the bubble missile, depicted only as an oblong bubble of air. Another thing left for players to wonder about is the different forms of treasure and their impact on both player and score. Treasure can be found in three forms: gold coins, gold bars, and treasure chests. However, it’s never explained whether these different forms are worth more points, take up different amounts of space in the diver’s backpack, or if they weigh down the diver any more or less than another. After my time with Aqua Lungers I deduced that coins are worth 50 points and chests are worth 500, but I’m not clear how much a gold bar is worth and still have no answers to any of my other questions. Since treasure and power-ups are really the core of the game, it was frustrating to have to guess at and experiment with these things.
Not perfect but certainly better than Aqua Lungers’ tutorials is its gameplay. Surprisingly, one of my favorite aspects of the gameplay is the lives system. Each player starts a match with three lives. Once a player is over-confident around the boss monster or underestimates a bomb’s blast radius enough times and runs out of lives, they’re not actually eliminated. Instead, players can trade in 200 of their points to spawn again. This is cool to me because it keeps players in a constant state of tense greed, wanting to make sure they get at least 200 points each time they respawn and keeps the stakes high, a necessity for a high-energy multiplayer game like this. It’s also great because it feels bad when all of your friends are playing video games around you and you’re stuck on the couch, waiting for a new round before you can play again. 200 points isn’t nothing, but it’s a comparatively small amount, fairly easily acquired. I think the game’s inherent risk/reward systems are another bright spot in the design. In most levels, there are multiple shipwrecks from which players can glean treasure, but there is always one wreck that has more treasure and at higher denominations. Unsurprisingly, this wreck, or nearby entrances and exits, are patrolled by the level’s incredibly lethal boss monster. So players have to weigh their options, especially taking into consideration the other players’ actions. Further complicating things, any treasure dropped near the boss monster will be retrieved by the creature, building its own score, so players have to be extra careful where they mess with their competitors to make sure they don’t hand the win to the boss. Unfortunately, I feel that the game design starts to fall apart at world five, slightly more than halfway through the game. At that point, the game starts throwing in non-boss monsters that can kill players. This was extremely frustrating to me, mostly because the game is enough of a challenge for one player without these additional threats, but also because it defies the game’s tone. Before this, the only real threat is the enormous boss monsters that look like they could level city blocks, but then suddenly the game introduces tiny little fish that are exactly as dangerous to me as a demon-lobster with glowing eyes. Lastly, I think Aqua Lungers shoots itself in the foot a bit by having a structured level system, as that makes it feel like it has a definite end to it. I believe a lot of multiplayer games are great because they can be played over and over again with friends, but since Aqua Lungers has a campaign and story which can be finished, that’s not quite true. I think a welcome addition would be a way for players to set up a custom scenario, mixing and matching bosses and levels to create a new experience every time. However, I’m not a programmer so I have no idea how feasible this idea is.
All in all, Aqua Lungers is a fun game, but it’s got enough flaws to make it not quite worth the full asking price. I don’t know why, but, while the game is $15 on Switch, it’s only $12 on Steam. Because of this, I think the best place to play is probably on Steam, not only for the cheaper price, but because it allows players to use the Remote Play Together function to play with friends who aren’t physically near, a restriction most people are dealing with today. But, if you’ve got several roommates, children, or friends in your immediate vicinity, Switch is perfectly fine. Wherever you buy it though, I’d advise waiting for a sale.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
