This review was written for the launch build of the game. Several of the problems with the game mentioned in this review have now been fixed. You can find my updated thoughts after the conclusion, and the verdict has been adjusted to better match the current version of the game.
In recent times, a new subgenre of co-op games has risen, with the most popular name for said genre being “friendslop”. The genre focuses on social interaction and being easy to pick up and play, so I get why some people have come to call it that – at least the “friend” part. What I don’t as much get, is why we’re calling these games “slop”. Now, I could make a long argument as to why I dislike it, but to keep it short, I just think games require too much work and effort to ever fall to the lows of being “slop”.
That was at least my opinion before playing Water You Doing? by DiSolve Studios. Water You Doing? attempts to ride the wave that RV There Yet? set in motion, with similar UI and Mechanics, and instead of driving an RV, you and your friends sail a boat through a set of treacherous rivers and lakes. Before moving on to what I have to say about this game, know that my friends and I found RV There Yet? incredibly entertaining, despite the many bugs in that game.
Teamwork is fun at times
The majority of your time in the game is spent on the boat, where you’ll be working alongside your friends to navigate narrow rivers – typically with mines or other obstacles in the way. While only a single player can control the boat directly using the ship’s wheel, harpoons can be mounted at a few predefined spots on the deck. Players can use these harpoons to hook onto surfaces and drag the boat towards them. These harpoons are essential for making sharp turns that the boat otherwise would not be able to.
While some players are controlling the boat using the ship’s wheel and harpoons, others might focus on keeping the hull in top shape. This typically involves patching holes with duct tape, and repairing broken parts of the cabin or deck using a hammer. All repairs require materials though, with wood and metal scrap being the main ones. These materials can either be found on land or purchased from a vending machine by selling fish you’ve caught.
When everyone is working together to navigate and keep the ship afloat, the game can be good fun. Sadly though, Water You Doing? seems afraid of offering players a proper challenge. There were only a few moments in the game where the game wasn’t way too easy, and in those moments, we did manage to have a good bit of fun. It does feel like there’s a good foundation in place for providing harder challenges though, and so I hope future maps will be more difficult.
Unplayably Buggy
Water You Doing? is buggy, and often to the point of being unplayable. There are a lot of minor bugs that don’t exactly break the game or get you stuck. Items and objects were sometimes not properly synced between my friends and I, and even if they were, we would occasionally have trouble picking them up. There were also times were we couldn’t drop or use the items we were holding – especially annoying when we had to revive a dead teammate using goldfish.
Other bugs are weird in that it’s hard to tell if it’s intended design or not. When dropping items while on the boat, they statically float in place, as if glued to some invisible aura emitted by the boat. There were also cases where, when one player died, everyone on the team would die, as if the developer wanted us to complete something in a very specific way, and if we didn’t do that, they’d just kick us back to the last checkpoint.
And then there are the gamebreaking bugs – the ones that make you question if the game was even tested at all. We luckily didn’t run into a lot of these, but when we did, we’d get hardstuck and have to start over from scratch. The most prominent one, is when you die and reload back to a checkout, the boat would start flying through the air, crashing onto land and getting destroyed, leading to an endless loop of reload back to checkpoint again and again.
Conclusion
Circling back to what I said in the introduction about games being underserving of being called “slop” – Water You Doing? truly is slop, and has challenged my tolerance for bugs in a way I thought impossible for a full release. I can sympathize with devs being surprised by the occasional bug or two slipping through playtests, but I honestly cannot believe that DiSolve Studios didn’t notice the messy state their game was in. Even when the game works properly, what’s there is mostly slow and boring, with only few entertaining sections throughout.
Updated thoughts
Most of the bugs mentioned in the review have been ironed out, and the devs genuinely seem to want to make a good game – very nice to see! Despite most of the bugs being fixed, I still can’t help but feel frustrated that the game launched in the state it was in, and not even in Early Access. While the game is playable from beginning to end now, the map remains the same and still doesn’t provide much of a challenge, and so that critique still stands. I do believe there’s a good foundation here, but I would love to see more variety in puzzles, rivers, obstacles and more. It all just feels a little underutilized right now. The verdict has been adjusted to reflect the current version of the game.
