Trident's Wake

Trident's Wake is a top-down twin-stick shooter set in a sci-fi universe, built around cooperative play and a light progression system layered over its combat loop. You and up to three other players navigate environments aboard what the premise frames as a massive colony ship, blasting through waves of enemies while unlocking incremental upgrades. On paper, that blueprint has worked for dozens of games in the genre. In practice, Trident's Wake struggles to make the moment-to-moment feel compelling enough to hold attention past the first session or two. The core shooting works in a basic functional sense. Enemies approach, you rotate, you fire, things die. But there is not much texture beneath that surface. Weapon variety is limited, the progression system does not generate the kind of build decisions that make games like this genuinely replayable, and the environments lean toward repetitive corridor layouts that start to blur together. For a co-op experience to survive on pure gunfeel and level design, both of those pillars need to be load-bearing. Here, neither quite is. The reception tells its own story. A Mostly Negative rating from the Steam community, sitting at 37 percent positive across over a hundred reviews, is not a number you can quietly look past. The complaints players raise are consistent: performance issues at launch, a thin content offering relative to what the co-op genre asks for, and a general sense that the game needed more time in development before shipping. Bacus Studios is a small team, and you can see the ambition they were reaching for. But ambition and execution are different things, and on release the gap between them was wide. Who might still find something here? If you have a very specific appetite for budget co-op shooters and a patient group of friends willing to treat a rough experience as part of the charm, there is a skeleton of something interesting underneath. The sci-fi setting has a cold, utilitarian atmosphere that I found briefly engaging, and the concept of a cooperative twin-stick game set on a derelict colony ship is genuinely one worth exploring. It just has not been explored as well as it deserved to be in this particular release. As someone who roots for small studios and wants every indie to land, this one is hard to recommend with enthusiasm in its current state. The review score is not unfair. If a future patch or update substantially reworks the content and performance, the underlying idea could earn a second look. Right now, there are sharper, fuller games in the twin-stick and co-op spaces competing for your time, and most of them will hold your group together longer.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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