Nautical Survival is an overlooked naval-based roguelite auto-shooter gem

Look away now if you value your free time, as Nautical Survival is an absolute gem that will throw your free hours overboard. I mentioned recently how I was on a bit of a quest to play every survivor-like I could find, and a reader emailed in about Nautical Survival. One I somehow missed, so I decided to rectify that situation. I wish I didn't, because it has completely reeled my in.

Most of these games inspired by the mechanics made popular in Vampire Survivors do something a bit unique, and I'm pleased to see again that Nautical Survival is another such game. All the basics are here that you know and love like collecting XP to level up and picking new abilities but it's the overall presentation and game mechanics in Nautical Survival that help set it apart.

For starters, most of the map you get is hidden in a shroud of mystery. You start off in a little boat by a lighthouse, which gives you a certain amount of vision around you. Go outside its light, and it gets more difficult as the light of your boat isn't very big which makes it quite intense as you can't see what's coming (unless you find an upgrade or two to help).

Enemy fish come in waves too, so you do get a brief bit to catch your breath. So it's more on the lines of Brotato in that way. However, it's all real-time. You need to travel between specific bits of land to access different shops, with your travel time taking away your rest between waves. Having to actually travel between these locations is another nice little change to the formula and allows you to open up a shop whenever you want too.

There's some other major features that really make it interesting. The weapon, upgrade, cargo and crew systems are the big ones. Here you collect yellow coins from killed fish, which eventually level you up to allow you to pick between a few different buffs like damage, steering, range and more. All pretty standard but, you also have a cargo system. You start off with limited cargo slots to fill with either weapons, crew members or packages. After each wave is completed, you then also get to promote a crew member which adds in their own special bonuses so there's a lot of ways to change your run each time/

It's a constant toss-up between filling up on more crew or more weapons and all the upgrades that you can do with each of them individually. Even more so, because you can add more cargo space to further make your boat insanely powered. There's also a little mini-delivery game in there, with packages taking up one of those precious cargo bays but delivering gives you a nice coin bonus to further upgrade what you already have.

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There's also certain weather effects to worry about too, like storm clouds that will zap you if you go under them. I really hope to see more from that side of the game added.

It's currently in Early Access and so I won't be giving it a full formal review just yet. But I think you can gather from my initial post here, that I already like it quite a lot. I can't wait to see what else is added to it. Definitely worth picking up if you enjoy short runs and trying out lots of different combinations with fun gameplay systems.

Despite it being an auto-shooter survivor-like, it also feels so weirdly chilled. Great atmosphere.