Smash Boats

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Smash Boats is a family-friendly Arcade-style game where players control a toy boat in an enclosed body of water (like a bathtub or a kiddie pool) and must ram into other toy boats to clear each level. This game was released on Nintendo Switch in 2021.

The presentation here is pretty good, especially considering the game’s tiny 312MB file size. The boats and objects in this game look decent, but the environments and water look really good. Nothing mind-blowing, but quite excellent given what little this game has to work with. This is paired with an energetic but forgettable soundtrack.

As for the gameplay, this is pretty simple, straightforward, and repetitive. You’re constantly moving forward, but you can charge forward to attack, charge backwards to attack, use a dive move to briefly dodge, brake, do a drifting turn, and use a special attack specific to the unlockable ship you choose before selecting a level. Add in a few simple power-ups like health and briefly stunning enemies, and that’s it. There’s some variety in enemies, but mostly they’re pretty repetitive and simple-minded. There’s nothing terribly wrong with it, but there’s nothing especially good about it either.

What’s really unfortunate is that there are multiple ways this game could have easily been improved. It needed Mario Kart-style power-ups to add variety. For that matter, it really needed multiplayer play and various game modes. And without this stuff, the game becomes something you’re not likely to want to play for more than five to ten minutes before moving on to something else.

As a result, Smash Boats is a decent but, well, shallow game. Good as a small distraction, but that’s it. And with an asking price of $15, this game really should be something more than that. However, even if the game had a huge price drop or a sale, Smash Boats is still nothing special, aside from perhaps the nice visuals. Not bad, but nothing especially good either.

tl;dr – Smash Boats is a family-friendly Arcade-style game where players try to use their toy boat to ram into other toy boats. This is a decent but far too simple game, and certainly not worth the $15 price tag. Maybe if there were more game modes, multiplayer, or more depth to the gameplay, this would be a better game, but as-is it’s probably best to miss this boat.

Grade: C-

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