Sea Salt

Genre: Top-Down Action / Real-Time Strategy

Players: 1

.

Review:

Sea Salt, released on the PC, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2019, is an unusual combination of genres. This game combines a Top-Down Action game with elements of a Real-Time Strategy, resulting in something that’s fairly unique. This game puts players in control of a horde of sea creatures sent to wreak havoc and destruction on the humans after their god was denied its usual human sacrifice.

Visually, Sea Salt has a decent presentation, making use of pixel art 2D visuals. I actually enjoyed the pixel art renderings of the game’s Victorian cities at night more than the visuals in the gameplay itself, which often made it difficult to make out just what you were looking at. This combines with incomprehensible grunting noises for the human speech, as well as their screams when they realize their doom is swiftly approaching, and a subdued soundtrack that was somewhat forgettable, but its gloomy nature at least did a good job reflecting the tone of the game.

As for the gameplay, players control and grow their horde of hideous sea beasts, either by collecting enough resources to grow their horde, or finding a summoning circle to do so all at once. Players can control what type of monster to flesh out their ranks with, whether it’s defensive crabs, long-range cultists, or one of various other creepy critters in your growing menagerie. Players take these creatures and loosely direct them using the analog stick.

Unfortunately, this is where the problems start. Your critters seem to take your direction very loosely. Highlight a place to go and they’ll try to get there, but their pathfinding isn’t very good. Highlight someone to attack and they’ll run over to hunt them down… as long as they don’t see someone else they’d rather attack along the way, or if the target flees too far from your cursor. Players will occasionally find themselves in the absurd position of their horde getting run ragged chasing down a fleeing human as he zig-zags around.

The controls are enough on their own to drag Sea Salt down somewhat, but things are made worse because the game doesn’t play to the strengths of either of its genres. There’s no visceral satisfaction in attacking enemies because you never do so directly and your troops seem to take your instruction as a suggestion rather than an order. And you don’t get to enjoy any elements of the Real-Time Strategy side of things because you don’t ever get to divide your forces to make for an intelligent attack, you don’t have much freedom to explore and gather resources (the game’s levels are mostly pretty linear), and the game doesn’t do a good job of outlining strengths and weaknesses of different monster types against different types of humans.

I give Sea Salt credit for doing something fairly unique and original, but unfortunately in the end it doesn’t work out to be something that was very enjoyable. The lack of direct control leaves this wanting as an Action game, and the lack of obedient minions and lack of resource-gathering left this wanting as a Real-Time Strategy. As a result, it’s hard for me to recommend this game to either group of players.

tl;dr – Sea Salt is a game that combines elements of Top-Down Action and Real-Time Strategy as you control a horde of sea creatures wreaking havoc on humanity at the behest of an angry sea deity. Unfortunately, this game doesn’t work as an Action game or a Strategy game, as your command over the horde is so imprecise that you ultimately just end up frustrated at your lack of control. While this is a unique game with interesting ideas, it’s not ultimately a game I can recommend.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Lee, Andy Miller, Stov, u/wonderponder, Ilya Zverev, Eli Goodman, and KC. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}