Submarine Survivor – PS5 Review

Submarine Survivor is, like so many other games on PSN right now, the latest stab at the auto-shooting rogue-like genre popularised by Vampire Survivors and perfected by Brotato.  It’s odd that so many of these games exist when you’re going up against two such brilliant games but here are The Bat Flight, or should we say is?  That’s because really this is the work of one solo Spanish developer.  And it’s brought to us by the ever-prolific publisher eastasiasoft.

You know how these things work.  You’re placed in an arena, this time an underwater one (not that it matters) and you’ve got to fend off hordes of angry sea creatures as they zone in on your submarine.  Unlike other games in the genre, you’re only trying to survive for five minutes at a time, which might not sound like much but when you’re neck deep in squids, it can be a challenge.

While you do auto-fire in this game, you don’t auto-aim, or indeed aim at all.  Your weapons essentially fire where they’re meant to and so you just have to figure out your relative position to your nearest foes to make sure they get caught up in it.  And while you do start with a pretty feeble laser gun that fires in four directions but very slowly, as enemies die you can level up by collecting tokens they leave behind.  Get enough of them to fill your experience bar and you’ll be offered a choice of three upgrades.

Upgrades come in two types:  new weapons and new chipsets.  There’s a large selection of weapons to find and experiment with while the chipsets offer passive buffs to damage, damage types, speed, pick up range, armour and so on.  So far, so straightforward.  And if you can survive the five minute wave you can either bug out, ready for your next battle, stick around long enough to mop up the remaining enemies and pick ups or add two minutes to the timer in an effort to grab more resources, albeit it at the cost of the enemies getting a bit stronger.

As with so many of these games, it’s the bits between battles that matter and Submarine Survivor has a lot going on.  Aside from experience tokens you also pick up resources and cash from defeated foes and these are used to beef up your build in a few ways.  Cash lets you upgrade your passive abilities permanently.  So you’ll be looking to add to your damage, speed, armour and all those other stats we mentioned before and more.  These are slow to really build up and take effect but they do help.

Aside from that though you’ve got new submarines to unlock, deals to make (these are minor upgrades that require sea shells to buy) and attachable items (that look like microchips) to buy, build, upgrade and repair.  They add some real faff to proceedings.  To upgrade them you need materials.  You find unrefined ores in gameplay and then have to refine them to make materials.  You can then trade 6000 of a lower type of material for 1000 of the first better type.  There are six types of material and so to get enough of the rarer types takes a lot of this refining.  And ultimately that’ll let you add a new stat to those items.  One that ultimately won’t make a huge amount of difference to your survivability.  It’s just a lot to take in initially.  Sure, it’s not as complex as Vampire Survivors‘ weapon evolutions and all that but it’s still a lot of faff for not much reward.  The same goes for the overall submarine upgrades.  These use ‘blueprints’ and, again, it’s never going to make you immediately that much more powered up.

All these various upgrading paths all live across a few main menu elements and then each of those will have choices of tabs/screens to navigate.  Even after several hours play, we’re still not always immediately sure where things are.  It’s definitely a very messy interface.

But when you combine the simple, but challenging, gameplay and the constant upgrading, you do get a bit of that survivors-like magic.  The game is certainly solid enough and the way the game mixes up environmental hazards means that you can’t just stay in one place like a sentry gun.  Each level has its own threat, from toxic clouds, barrels, geysers and so on, and you have to work through at least eight of these stages before facing off against the final boss.  The fact that it’s all broken down into five minute levels is good too.  That’s a good balance between the action and the upgrading stages of the game.

In the end, the game’s biggest strength is that it’s got a bit of substance to it.  We’ve reviewed a load of these sort of games, including a couple of terrible ones from this publisher, but Submarine Survivor has a enough going on to keep it interesting.  Where it really lets itself down though is the difficulty/progression curve.  After beating the first boss, the difficulty really ramps up.  But it’s not skill difficulty, it’s just that the enemies are more durable.  You can’t just out-skill it, you have to out-level it and that goes slower and slower as the upgrades become more expensive.  There are three bosses in total and the difference between getting to, and beating, the first and second ones is ridiculous.  The game’s trophy set reflects that by entirely ignoring that and letting you get the Platinum without facing the second boss.

That said, the game has kept us entertained.  We’re fans of the genre and Submarine Survivor‘s game, and meta-game, are interesting enough to make this one of the better examples of this type of game.  A bit of difficulty tweaking would be nice, and we don’t expect to ever see that happen, but if you’ve got days spare to grind it out, and if you don’t get bored of having to replay it over and over, you might just enjoy this one.