Trash Sailors – Review
Party games have been on the rise again during the last few years. This spark was somewhat ignited by Team17’s Overcooked!, which took the world by storm. Soon after, many others tried to release their own original and funny party game. We have reviewed many, and while some were also great experiences, a lot of them tried to clone experiences from other titles and bank on their success. Now, we have a title that also tries to bring us a party experience, albeit with a very original twist. In Trash Sailors, we are sailors, fishing for trash, to survive in a fully flooded world. We were intrigued, and even entertained, but the game still needs quite a bit of polish to become the next best thing.
Story
The world has been flooded by what has been described as a trash tsunami. Due to this, it seems there is no more dry land, and the only means of getting from point A to B is by having your own boat, or shabby floatation device. In this scenario, you’ll play as a bunch of ‘trash sailors’, just trying to make it to the next day. Sadly, the game doesn’t really have any narrative value, and you’ll only see a few unvoiced cutscenes when you unlock one of the few characters. This feels like a huge missed opportunity, as the game has a lot of (visual) charm.
Graphics
Trash Sailors is a stunningly beautiful game. The designs in this game could easily come from a Tim Burton-esque series, albeit with some warmer and brighter color tones. The world-building is amazing, and the different themes the game has on display are a lot of fun to explore. There’s sadly just not that much content in the game. We would have loved to see more characters, more original environments, and perhaps even more options for your raft. That being said, what’s present in the game is absolutely stunning.
Sound
The sound design isn’t the strongest point of the game. The sound effects are functional, the music is entertaining enough, but nothing truly stands out and nothing ends up being memorable or even noteworthy for that matter. The soundtrack will not annoy you, but it’s just a bit bland.
Gameplay
Trash Sailors is all about getting your makeshift raft safely from point A to B. This cooperative party game will throw you in many different stages where you’ll have to fish for trash to power your engine, battle creepy monsters and miscreants while maintaining your ship, keeping the lights on in the dark, and of course, steering clear of obstacles. The offset is quite simple and enjoyable, and we soon found ourselves commandeering our holey ship quite skillfully. The basics of the game involve fishing up trash, putting them in your trash compactor, to then using these converted items to power your engine or to fix your ship. We can immediately state that this game is best enjoyed in local or online multiplayer, as the AI helper during single-player play does not offer that much help.
When progressing through the game, you’ll also unlock many upgrades to keep you afloat for that much longer. You can add cannons to your ship, as well as more effective engines, better lights to keep monsters at bay in the dark, an anchor, a grappling hook, and so on. There are also some cosmetic items to be unlocked, which is interesting for completionists. The game does also make use of map pieces you have to collect to unlock later levels. These also have to be reeled in by your fishing rod(s), same as all the trash you fish out of the water for your engine.
Even though the game’s core is actually quite entertaining, albeit a bit slow at times, the game is riddled with game-breaking bugs. We encountered issues where items would just randomly despawn, and if these items were our collected map pieces, we were forced to replay levels to get all of these. On top of the despawning issues, we also had a lot of trouble with the game’s hitboxes, and even worse, the game suffers from massive desyncing issues. The latter constantly happened during our online co-op sessions, where certain players could not see enemies, while others were fighting with them. This also caused certain players not to see the map items, and even have them disappear when another player would reel them in. Other than that, the controls are very unresponsive, and it’s very hard to try and fish, when you’re too close to a cannon, as the game will then immediately put you at said cannon. This also happened with climbing the mast, and other actions, as they all use the same button input to trigger.
Conclusion
Trash Sailors is a fun and engaging co-op title, but it lacks in a lot of departments to truly make it a gem. We adored the visuals of the game, only to be let down by the somewhat disappointing soundtrack, the lack of a fleshed-out story, and the many bugs that we encountered during our playthrough. It also doesn’t help that the experience is fairly short, and even has syncing errors when playing online. We still very much enjoyed playing with friends, but we do advise you to wait for a patch or two if you’re planning to play online, and perhaps even wait for a sale to make the price tag a bit more attractive.
Trash Sailors - Review,
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[…] The hand-drawn co-op sailing adventure Trash Sailors is now available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4! This game has been developed by fluckyMachine and published by tinyBuild. You can buy Trash Sailors for $19.99/€19.99, and the game supports English, German, Russian, French, Italian, Spanish (Spain), Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, and Simplified Chinese languages. This game has also been released for PC (via Steam), you can read our review here. […]