Coast Guard Review

I have a certain fondness for indie games. Especially ones that try to do something a bit different. I was quite excited for Coast Guard because it seemed like the kind of game which fitted that description perfectly. I’ve never seen a game which puts you in the role of a coastguard and I don’t really know that much about them. I thought I’d get the chance to run around in orange speedos but apparently that’s lifeguards. It was too late to back out by the time I realised this though so here I am reviewing Coast Guard.

The game is a combination of sailing simulator, FPS and adventure. It starts with you, as Finn Asdair, waking up from having blacked out on a ship of some kind which clearly isn’t your own and trying to find out what happened. The majority of the events in the game are told via flashbacks and the story of how you came to be where you are now is fleshed out through these flashbacks. It’s a pretty engaging storyline which will give you reason to play on to find out what happens next.

I found that said story was better followed if I muted the sound and turned on subtitles. This game contains some incredibly wooden and unconvincing voice acting. We’re talking Resident Evil levels of voice acting here, it’s pretty poor. That said, I prefer to mute games and listen to my own music a lot anyway so it’s not a great loss. I won’t hate on this game for its poor voice acting. Not when there are many other things for which it deserves hatred.

Why do they need so many socks? There's only 4 people on this boat.

The game uses a proprietary engine, and Reality Twist have made some pretty good use of it. There’s a reasonably nice texture resolution and everything is lovely and sharp. It’s not perfect though, there are a number of reminders that this is still a virtual world. The waves behind you move unnaturally slow, with troughs in the sea following behind as if they were part of your ship. The foam and spray looks lovely in still shots but they’re a little flat up close when animated. With such a small development team, this title was never gonna give Far Cry 4 a run for its money, but given the resources available to an indie team, they did a pretty good job of creating a decent looking game. With a little more polish, it could look like a AAA release. Perhaps one for the modders at a later date, if they have the patience to sit through the game.

The controls are a bit unusual. You can operate each rudder independently, but there’s seldom any need to as you can just use the keyboard to shift all three in unison then turn with the steering wheel instead which is far easier anyway. There’s a console full of buttons shown in front of you in the first person camera view but you can’t use any of them, it’s not a detailed sailing simulator like you might expect, meaning you don’t have the granular control you would expect from a simulator. Turning is as slow and cumbersome as you’d expect from such a large vessel, but this expands beyond the main ship and also affects the smaller daughterboat that you will go out in to rescue people. This helps keep the game nice and slow. Especially as you can apparently only rescue people if they are within 3 feet of you, meaning you have to drive around in little circles for five minutes like you’re trying to find a parking space at a supermarket until you finally get in just the right position to throw your little rubber ring at them. I also found I couldn’t get it to work with the rudder controls on my flight stick which would have made it feel a bit more realistic.

 The first person sections don’t speed things up much either. There’s a lot of looking around for clues as to what happened in the early part of the game but because the character has that classic videogame amnesia, there’s no way of knowing what you’re looking for. In one part I was literally wandering around for five minutes until my character spotted a door. A ruddy door which looked exactly like all the other doors in the game but that apparently reminded him of something or other! I had a suspected saboteur to interrogate at one point and that consisted of clicking sentences in order until they were all exhausted. I tried this bit a couple of times to see if it was a branched conversation but sadly it wasn’t. The conversation options you have are the same each time and you just keep asking everything until the game lets you move on. It might as well have been a cutscene because it wasn’t really a conversation at all.

Even the characters in the game would rather be playing a different game.

 In three hours of gameplay, I never felt like the game got out of first gear at all. It runs at a snail's pace and everything just takes such a painfully long time. You’ll often find yourself sailing through open sea like it’s treacle for a few minutes, then another flashback scene is triggered when you arrive at your destination so you will be left wondering why we had to see the journey if that was going to be all that happened. Imagine if you will a Sonic game where he has to walk to the start of Act Two of the Green Hill Zone before you can move on to it. Or perhaps a version of Just Cause where you have to tidy up all that stuff you just broke before you can move on in the campaign. You wouldn’t play them would you? But apparently the creators of this game would. You know how in 24, you never see Kiefer Sutherland and his team go to the loo or make a cup of tea, even though the show is in real time? That’s not because Fox think that Jack Bauer is so tough he doesn’t need to urinate, but because they know that complete unadulterated realism isn’t fun. Someone needs to tell Reality Twist this because they really haven’t caught on.

Overall, Coast Guard is a great concept that has been executed poorly. It’s too slow and cumbersome for action fans but too shallow for those wanting to put themselves deeply in the shoes of a ship captain. This leaves us with a game that’s somewhere in the middle. In trying to straddle genres and gameplay styles, Reality Twist have ended up being something of a jack of all trades so it’s hard to tell who will find enjoyment out of this game. Water waste of a good concept: it promised so much boat didn’t deliver.