Ship of Fools Review

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Fast Facts

Climb Aboard

Ship of Fools is a top-down roguelike featuring seafaring adventurers on their journey to eradicate darkness. On this journey, I armed weaponry, selected artifacts to bolster my performance, and did my best to keep up with the ever increasing hordes of creatures and enemy projectiles bombarding my ship. Was the journey worth the voyage? Find out in this Rapid Review.

When I booted up the game for the first time, I was introduced to my main character, who miraculously washes ashore on an island. From there, he gets selected to assist the island residents on their quest to repel the darkness. The storyline is sufficient, but does not do much more than that. None of the characters were particularly interesting, and the plotline did not impact my motivations for the game. However, it nicely introduced the premise and offered a clear objective to end the game. While the narrative did not contribute much to my enjoyment of the game, I was not necessarily expecting it to.

Instead, the core focus of Ship of Fools is gameplay. For starters, my main character had a decent number of abilities for me to get used to. He could walk around, picking things up and placing them in different locations. This enabled me to arm cannons, repair my ship, and save important items. Additionally, he wields an oar in battle to both reflect projectiles and smack at enemy advances. I enjoyed how the same tool is used for offense and defense in this game, as the continuous flow of projectiles and enemies kept me busy. Being able to rely heavily on one tool in handling many situations was a lot of fun. Rounding out the package with a simple dodge roll, my main character had plenty of abilities which made combat enjoyable.

Walk the Plank

As much as I enjoyed the main character’s abilities, they are particularly helpful given the different types of enemies I faced. For starters, the game constantly throws me against tens of enemies at once. This encouraged me to think through my priorities at almost all times. I felt as though I was constantly putting out fires, yet it was a lot of fun. As a result of the drastic volume of projectiles and enemies, many of the foes themselves are somewhat simple. Though this sounds like a bad thing, I think this works to the game’s advantage. I constantly knew what enemies did, and could appropriately prioritize. The enemies were designed well to fit the overarching theme while maintaining my interest.

In addition to the generic enemies, Ship of Fools features a few boss fights. Though these boss fights are always the same round after round, I enjoyed them, especially the first few times I played against them. While not functionally different from the primary gameplay loop, these behemoths were visually exciting. The combat, for the most part, was very fair, and I rarely felt myself getting frustrated that bosses were too challenging. While I would have preferred a bit more variety here, especially since I face the same bosses across runs, these fights were also enjoyable to endure.

In addition to enemy characters, there were a handful of friendly people I could encounter along the way. Some of these characters remained at their locations, but others joined me back at my village and worked to improve my longevity in other ways. I could enhance my weaponry, my boat, and unleash new abilities into the item pool. None of this is necessarily revolutionary, but I enjoyed the way the gameplay loop worked out.

Augmentation and Strategy

Ship of Fools also features a wide variety of different items to leverage. I got to experiment with wildly different types of ammunition, unique passive abilities, and even artifacts. Each of these things contributed to my experience, but the guns were the most impactful. This was actually quite fun. Some guns had big areas of effect but limited ammunition, others had piercing abilities, and some even triggered special effects, like bringing seagulls onto the boat. I enjoyed experimenting with the different types of ammunition. The artifacts and trinkets, while fun, were not overly varied. Many increased abilities by a certain percentage, which was not overly fun or interesting. Even some of the examples which did lead to specific status effects were not overly interesting, as to achieve these things, I rarely did anything differently. Designing a successful strategy still required thought, but many artifacts were not overly unique.

While some trinkets could have been more novel, the core gameplay loop of Ship of Fools is a lot of fun. I never found it too frustrating. Deaths felt like my fault, and I continually earned things to grant permanent buffs, even on runs where I did not perform very well. The game does a good job balancing difficulty and reward. Moreover, after a run is completed, there are higher difficulties and a narrative drive to complete those. The difficulty balance is good, and even offers additional content beyond what is necessary. 

Piecing it Together

In addition to the core gameplay loop, Ship of Fools is visually appealing. It uses a unique color palette when compared to many games I play. In fact, the more muted tones work very nicely with the nautical theme. Moreover, the sprites are very legible and intuitive. Enemies flash red when they are planning to do an attack, and I consistently found the visual cues to be adequate in helping me determine my next steps. The audio design was also impressive. It matched the theme of the game nicely while getting caught in my head a few times too. I appreciated listening to the music, even while playing a few runs in a row. I enjoyed the game’s aesthetics. 

Overall, Ship of Fools is a nice experience. The gameplay is unique, blending a top-down roguelike with an almost Overcooked style crisis management gameplay loop. Enemies, while somewhat simple, clearly telegraph their attacks and kept me entertained throughout my playthrough. The lack of wholly novel bosses and artifacts does make some playthroughs somewhat repetitive, especially as the majority of the challenge comes from the end, but I definitely can recommend this game. I am happy I got the chance to play it. 

Rapid Reviews Rating

4 out of 5

4

You can purchase Ship of Fools on the Microsoft Store here.