The call of the sea has rung out loud and clear through history, dragging people away from the comfort of home into the oceans of the world. What’s out there is a mystery, whether that be a new land, mysterious fish, or mythological beastie, but the power of the endless expanse of ocean acts like a magnet to adventure. Sometimes a short, wet and final adventure, but it’s the risks of the seafaring life that make it enticing. Breakwaters is a survival game set in an expansive ocean dotted with islands, some settled and others home to trees, boars and wandering golems, and out in the depths of the oceans are enormous titans stirring up the waters.
Breakwaters released a few days ago in Early Access and its unique hook is that playing with water is almost as important as playing on land. Water is everywhere, whether it be in the ocean or emanating from blue crystals on the island hillsides, and you can use it to swim in, sail over, add as a decoration for home base, lure slimes to their gooey doom in a pool and bottle it up to use as a water grenade. But first you need to survive, and that’s going to take the usual scavenging of every resource the islands have to offer.
While the world is generated from a seed that you enter at game’s start, you always spawn on a near-empty tropical island covered in palm trees and with a helpful guide to get you started. Beat up crabs to get their shells, punch bushes for sticks, and soon you’ve got the resources for the first tools. After that it’s on to bigger and better things, starting with the crafting bench and working from there, basically following Survival Game Progression 101. It’s not the core gameplay loop setting Breakwaters apart, but rather its world.
The first island is a nice enough place to start, but it’s missing the resources necessary to build the good stuff. Once you’ve done everything necessary the ferry takes you to a much larger island with pine trees, breakable rocks and iron, plus the first hints of the bigger game beyond. Titans wander the ocean causing problems wherever they roam, and these massive behemoths need a daring adventurer to craft their way up to weapons strong enough to take them out, not to mention building a boat to sail there.
The thing to keep in mind about Breakwaters, though, is that it’s exceptionally Early Access. The islands are beautiful, even if there’s only the palm- and pine-tree biomes, set under a brilliant blue sky in the day and with the moon reflecting off the ocean and shooting beams through the trees at night. Being able to play with the water is hugely satisfying as well, with the yellow crystals found along the beaches acting as water-repellant, and the shards from the crystals can be crafted into torches that let you carve dry paths into the seabed as the ocean creates walls around you. The game is loaded with potential but it’s still struggling with bugs, system balancing, UI structures and just about every other aspect.
Take trees, for example. Trees are known for being tall and wooden, and not at all for their ability to wander. I’m fairly sure the pine trees with blue crystals in their trunks are attracted to water, slowly moving towards it a bit at a time, but nowhere is this explained or even hinted at and I can’t say for sure that I’m not trying to come up with a lore-based excuse for a bug. Inventory is another huge sticking point, and it’s already been slightly improved in updates since the Early Access Release. At the start you’ve got an eight-slot toolbar and that’s everything you may carry, and while the archaeologist on the island quickly gives you a cloth pouch, it’s still limiting for the sheer volume of different resources available. Even when you get the largest carrying bag available it’s still cramped, and you’ll need to build a good number of chests to hold everything you’ll find. The thing about having all these different resources available, whether they be sticks and branches, rocks, crystals, palm and pine wood, and a good number of plants from land and sea, is that there’s no real way to know what’s useful or not until you’ve constructed all the different crafting stations. It doesn’t help that each tool and treasure map fill up an inventory slot apiece, further restricting scavenging, and items stack to arbitrary numbers before the next one takes up a new spot. Inventory is usually a sticking point with survival games, but Breakwaters feels particularly cramped for space.
There’s no question there’s a lot of work to be done to bring Breakwaters up to speed, but it’s worth noting the game has received multiple patches and updates since release and doesn’t seem to be slowing down. There’s weirdness and oddities and jank everywhere, from flat and ugly menu icons to identical villagers with filler dialogue to crafting recipes that aren’t available yet, but the potential is there and there’s noticeable progress building slowly towards it. I’ll admit to liking the game I think Breakwaters will become more than what it currently is, but I find myself going back time after time to peek around the rough edges at all the bits that work. There’s a big watery world filled with rogues and pirates and you’ve got a boat to explore it with, and it’s hard to resist the call of the wide open sea.
