Wavetale

What if Jesus where a blue haired teenage girl?

Why

Why Not

Impressions

First impressions were great, it's clearly not meant to be challenging but the movement feels fluid, voice acting and art are great and the worldbuilding/story provide enough of a hook to give as sense of purpose. Flying through the waves, launching into the air off the crest of a wave onto an island is a good time. You have a double jump, dash and hover right off the bat, which combine to make platforming very forgiving. Everything's set up for a few chill hours of zooming around having story delivered to you, but a few spots on this otherwise tight & polished experience mar the finish.

The core mechanic, your ability to glide over the water, isn't tutorialized as well as the platforming and (potentially) suffers for it. Unless I missed it, Wavetale never explains exactly how to leap off a wave in such a way that you can dive back into the water for max speed, so I'm left feeling unsure if it's buggy and inconsistent or I was just doing it wrong. This inability to submerge can feel really awkward during the numerous long sections which require following boats through mostly open seas, where you can be stuck gliding along the water like a chump rather than through it at full speed.

Platforming is great for what it's meant to be, a fun way to jump around the scenery between collectibles. But the combat just feels shoehorned in. It essentially boils down to mashing the attack button, occasionally dashing away if there are too many enemies to stunlock by button mashing. There's some kind of lock-on system but you can't control it, and the white outline indicating whether you're locked on and will dash across the screen to attack or impotently swing your net in place isn't easy to distinguish. You have something like 8 health, which recovers quickly and is only depleted by one bar when hit. You'll never die unless you put your controller down and go grab a snack. There are only 3 land-based enemy types, plus striders in the water which are actually pretty fun to zoom through after defeating, which lets you dive back beneath the waves.

Luckily you can completely ignore land-based combat by just platforming past it for the whole game... until the final battle. Yep, after a fun platforming section zooming toward the end, you're stuck in a 10min long button mashing sequence against some helpless looking diving helmet which summons the same land-based enemies you've been ignoring all game. The combat is too simplistic to add any sense of tension, so I wish they'd dropped it altogether and just leaned into the platforming/waverunning. To add insult to injury, this is the only time the MC has voicelines during combat, and they're repeated endlessly. Speaking of speaking, another issue with the finale is that in the build-up, the normally excellent voice acting just... stops. In a climactic, meant to be emotional scene before our heroes head in for the final battle, everyone's voices just disappear and are replaced by text-accompanied grunts like a low budget visual novel. This took me right out of the mood in what should have been the game's climax.

There are also some minor bugs like glitching back to where you started in a very disorienting way if you narrowly miss a ledge, and loading back into the game displaying then marking as completed all the quests you've done up to that point. I was stuck with one of the last quests in my todo list even post-credits despite completing it, though it at least didn't block progressing the story. These don't really matter but they contributed to the feeling of things being just a little off, which made it hard to just sit back and relax as I was intended to.

Conclusion

A chill, stylish 3-4 hour experience marred by a lack of polish and shoehorned-in combat. I had fun with it, but couldn't shake the feeling it could be better. Still worth picking up on sale despite its flaws.