{"id":130486,"date":"2022-12-12T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/#article-142100"},"modified":"2022-12-12T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-12-12T18:00:00","slug":"review-wavetale-wind-waker-meets-platforming-for-a-cruisy-but-bumpy-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2022\/12\/12\/review-wavetale-wind-waker-meets-platforming-for-a-cruisy-but-bumpy-ride\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Wavetale \u2013 Wind Waker Meets Platforming For A Cruisy But Bumpy Ride"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/div>\n
\n
\"Wavetale<\/a>
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld\/Undocked)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ah, water. Calming, tranquil, fun. You\u2019d struggle to find a game that doesn\u2019t have some body of water in it. But Wavetale<\/a> dives into the deep end. This adventure title from Thunderful sees players exploring by walking, running, and gliding on water. Initially released for Stadia, it has now spread to PC and consoles. For the most part, it\u2019s relaxing to play, although it struggles a little on Switch.<\/p>\n

Wavetale takes place in the aptly-named Strandville, a town that has been literally and figuratively flooded by baddies known as the Dirty Paws. You play as heroine Sigrid \u2013 a sarcastic, cynical young adult whose temperament comes through in the talented voice over actor\u2019s sighs and mumbles. She lives with a grandmother who won\u2019t even let her dip her toe in the surrounding sea, because the world beyond is covered with dark perilous clouds (\u2018Gloom\u2019). Naturally, she longs to explore those uncharted waters.<\/p>\n

And she does. Not by choice, though. The first chapter takes place on home grounds, where you collect \u2018Sparks\u2019 (cute blue blob-shaped sources of electricity) for Grandma. Once you\u2019re done, a tidal wave hits the town and throws Sigrid onto a patch of land. There she meets a mysterious underwater creature, which mirrors her movements from beneath the surface, enabling her to walk and surf on the ocean.<\/p>\n

\"Wavetale<\/a>
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld\/Undocked)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Though sceptical of the being at first, Grandma allows Sigrid to take the plunge and leave home to collect Sparks and money. That\u2019s when the journey truly begins. With the wind in your hair and a net in your hands, you surf the seas to tick off requests, complete puzzles, fight enemies, and piece together the story of Sigrid\u2019s dead mother. Grandma communicates with Sigrid through a headset, directing the player and driving the story with sassy annotations. The repartee between grandmother and granddaughter is amusing and drizzled with water puns, \u2018motherfloundering\u2019 and \u2018roaring rapids!\u2019 among them.<\/p>\n

Zipping around on the ocean is the best and most fun part of the game. It\u2019s somehow both speedy and relaxing at the same time, heightened by soothing splash sound effects and sleep playlist-worthy travel music. Completing puzzles keeps the fluid movement going, as you catapult and fly through the air to reach higher planes, though this is accompanied by music at a tempo that matches the tasks\u2019 urgency.<\/p>\n

But even when its pace picks up, Wavetale\u2019s primary focus is leisure. The straightforward puzzles engage Sigrid\u2019s skills (double-jumping, gliding, grappling and, of course, running on water) to move through obstacle courses and activate switches. Meanwhile you\u2019ll battle enemies that graduate in difficulty, but the combat is chill, not chilling. Your health regenerates without food or sleep. Three monsters might approach you at once but they\u2019ll wait their turn before hitting you. And it\u2019s satisfying watching them explode in a paint splatter. Even the boss fights test speed and dexterity, not combat strategy.<\/p>\n

\"Wavetale<\/a>
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld\/Undocked)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We found the trickier challenge was mastering the controls, as a few combinations felt unnatural and the camera is quite fiddly. Wavetale doesn\u2019t use the Switch\u2019s motion controls, instead relying on the right joystick to change viewpoints. This wouldn\u2019t be an issue except the camera often automatically swings back to behind Sigrid. It\u2019s quite frustrating during boss battles where the game expects haste, responsiveness, and accuracy, yet bars the player from getting a full view. Sometimes it was so hard to see where we were going that we just hookshotted blindly into the air and hoped for the best.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not much freeplay, at least not in the initial playthrough. If you veer away from the direction the compass points to, Gloom swallows you up and plonks you back onto the straight and narrow. It\u2019s a relatively creative way of integrating storyline with game mechanic, but it is less blank canvas and more paint by numbers.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a nice segue to the art style, which looks a little like a meditative paint-by-numbers piece. The textures and reflections are done in flat shapes and clean lines. The characters are drawn with unique shapes too, in a semi-low poly manga style. Between sea and sky, this game uses every shade of blue. The coastal design appeals to our inner child\u2019s sense of adventure.<\/p>\n

\"Wavetale<\/a>
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld\/Undocked)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While Wavetale is certainly a fun ride, the Switch version is not all smooth sailing. The font size is minuscule and both the text and compass are in a hue so similar to the sky they\u2019re hard to see, particularly in handheld mode. The autosave text suffers from the same problem. That meant the game\u2019s infrequent saving also left us replaying certain parts if we closed it.<\/p>\n

On the technical side, the frame rate is slower than on other platforms and there were some glitchy areas \u2013 for example, sometimes we found ourselves inside walls or suspended in mid-air. Though there are settings for camera movement and font size, adjusting them didn\u2019t seem to change much. With so many games on the Switch, we wouldn\u2019t say this one is a must-buy, but it is a rollicking ride for anyone who likes their games cruisy and pretty.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n

Wavetale is a gentle, easygoing game that suits players who don\u2019t want to strain themselves, as its quick runtime ensures the play doesn\u2019t dry up. We enjoyed skidding around on the ocean and swinging from great heights with our grappling hook. We only wished the camera movement and other mechanics were a little smoother. The game is nonetheless pretty fun \u2013 after all, it\u2019s hard not to enjoy surfing through a picturesque, water-filled landscape. While we\u2019ve played far better games, we felt like this short title was still a good one to dip your toes into.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld\/Undocked) Ah, water. Calming, tranquil, fun. You\u2019d struggle to find a game that doesn\u2019t have some body of water in it. But Wavetale dives into the deep end. This adventure title from Thunderful sees players exploring by walking, running, and gliding on water. Initially released for Stadia, it has now spread […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}