Battlewake combines Assassin's Creed: Black Flag's ship-to-ship combat with Sea of Thieves' fantasy aesthetics
V-Yarr!
If you've ever played Sea of Thieves or Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, you'll feel right at home with Battlewake, the newest nautical number from VR developer, Survios.
As I discovered when I played the PSVR build for this week's episode of Ian's VR Corner, Battlewake feels like someone has plundered the ship-to-ship combat sections from Ubisoft's swashbuckler simulator and skinned them with Rare's colourful, cartoony corsairs.
You'd think that mixing VR induced motion sickness with potential sea sickness would be a recipe for naval nausea, but thankfully, Battlewake is a surprisingly comfortable experience. The game can be played with the DualShock, but I opted for twin Move controllers, which had me gripping the ship's wheel to fire my guns and cannons with one hand, whilst grabbing the anchor with the other to perform evasive manoeuvres on the high seas.
Currently, the PSVR version of Battlewake is only available on the US Playstation store and there's no news yet as to when it will release in the EU. This is problematic in a variety of ways, but mainly, as you'll see in this week's video, it means that the multiplayer lobbies are entirely empty. This wouldn't be a huge problem if Battlewake had a hefty campaign as a backbone, but unfortunately it's rather lacklustre, relatively short and really, it just acts as a tutorial of sorts, allowing you to spend time with each of the four characters in order to learn their special abilities and ultimates.
Looking at feedback from US players, it seems like the multiplayer portion of Battlewake is where the game truly shines, so here's hoping that I'll finally be able to give that a go once the game releases officially in this corner of the world.