Some video games are best for two. Play Ship of Fools on your own and you’ll likely have deleted and entirely forgotten about the game by lunchtime. Play it with a friend, however, and you’ll undoubtedly both be obsessing about it after a long rambunctious night of seafaring; racking your brains with ingenious plans about how you can finally best that final blasted boss.
To explain, Ship of Fools is a rogue-lite co-op adventure, one that tasks you and your pal with defending your vessel from horrendous beasties as it plunges ever deeper into unknown seas. Played from a top-down perspective, your trusty ship will be attacked from all sides by hordes of creatures. You’ll have to man your cannons and blast your foes back to Davey Jones’ Locker, whilst also making sure you keep your ammo topped up and whacking away any creatures that get too close with your mighty paddle.
Whilst the cutesy anthropomorphic fish-like protagonists have no health themselves – they can only be stunned – your ship does. Take too many hits without repairing them with some helpful planks of wood and you’ll soon be taking on water and your run will be over. This being a rogue-lite, you’ll be starting your voyage from the beginning again, though not before making some permanent stat improvements to your ship, thanks to the resources you’d gathered.
It’s a solid enough formula, one tried, tested, and honed by many rogue-lites before it. The thing that sets Ship of Fools apart from its contemporaries, is that it is built for two players. Working together as a team is absolutely crucial to success. Imagine the co-op brilliance of Overcooked! as a rogue-lite and you are pretty much thinking about Ship of Fools. Whilst your ship has four cannon placements, it only has two cannons. This means you must work together in slick and decisive harmony to move your cannons to the correct position, load them, and repel your attackers.
Enemies will test your team working skills to the limit. Some, like a giant crab, will only harm your ship, others, like a flying squid thing, will use energy beams to stun the player characters. There are deeply annoying puffer fish that will charge directly at your vessel like a homing missile, and then there are deadly flying nasties whose sole purpose is to shoot little slugs at your poop deck.
The various combinations of enemies you face are key to Ship of Fools appeal, each arrangement requiring a different frantic defence. The tactical options are enhanced by a choice of different cannons, from shotgun-like scatter-shots to automated turrets. You and your partner will have your flippers full keeping your ship safe but when you manage it, boy-oh-boy, an intense feeling of satisfaction will be yours to enjoy.
Between each encounter, you’ll return to a board-game-like screen, where you can plan the next step of your journey. On your expedition, you’ll gather new ammo types, protective shields, various stat boosts, and bonuses, as well as new player characters. It all adds up to a sublimely addictive gameplay loop, each new run bringing you closer and closer to the next boss. That ‘just one more go’ moment is never far away in Ship of Fools.
Talking of the bosses, they don’t disappoint. Each of them are vast and extremely nasty critters, the showdowns that result are suitably epic. Smartly, the skills and tactics you will have honed on the run-up to the boss will be the same required to beat them. Though initially the boss’ attacks can be so intense it takes a while to see that – thankfully you can just have another run. Even if it is 3am in the morning and you’ve really got to go to bed as you’ve got an early start.
All this glowing praise isn’t to say that Ship of Fools isn’t without its issues, there are still some glaring bugs, even with a year on PC prior to this console release. At the end of some encounters, the game forgets to move on, leaving you literally marooned at sea and forcing a restart. Then there’s a weird bug where the game unlocks all the characters for one playthrough before hiding them all again on the next. There’s also some iffy collision detection, with certain sea debris blocking your cannonballs from their target, even though the shot can easily be achieved. Hopefully, all these issues can be ironed out, as Ship of Fools is something my partner and I intend to be playing for some time to come.