Ace of Seafood

I went in expecting a joke that runs out of material in twenty minutes. What I found instead was something more stubborn and strange: a small Japanese open-world shooter about building a six-creature squadron, conquering reefs, and harvesting enemy DNA to breed stronger allies - a feedback loop that quietly pulls you in deeper than its rough exterior deserves. The starting choice between three archetypes - the fragile but pack-minded sardines, the armored tank-like lobster, or the generalist salmon - sets the tone immediately. Calappa Games is not interested in easing you in. The core loop is reef-by-reef territorial expansion. You sweep the ocean for enemy-controlled reefs, wipe out the creatures guarding them (hermit crabs, barracudas, great white sharks, drifting battleships with no crew), absorb their genetic material, and breed new units to join your school. Squad composition matters more than it first appears: hard-shelled units soak damage from attack-heavy enemies, faster fish kite slower ones, and the formation commands - tight cluster, spread line, defensive wrap - actually shift combat outcomes. The point budget system that caps what six creatures you can field forces you to think about balance rather than just fielding six sharks. That layer of tactical texture is where the game earns its 91% Steam rating despite looking like a weekend prototype. And look, the rough edges are real. The UI is a wall of overlapping gauges and reticles that nobody bothered to tidy up. The translation is charmingly broken in ways that add to the atmosphere rather than inform it. Combat in a dense reef fight turns into a chaotic soup of laser blasts and flopping geometry where scale goes completely wrong - a giant squid the size of a cathedral fighting a miniature destroyer. Some players will find that bewildering energy funny; others will find it actively exhausting. The grinding is present and front-loaded, and the open-world ocean map is vast but largely featureless between objectives. If you need visual clarity and polished feedback to stay engaged, this will shed you early. What stays with me is the mood underneath the absurdity. The post-human ocean is genuinely quiet in the stretches between fights - no dialogue, no story beats, just the deep water and the strange creatures that have inherited it. There is something almost meditative about cruising through those blue trenches with your school of allied salmon trailing behind, and the techno soundtrack that kicks in during combat has a frenetic energy that matches the laser chaos well enough to feel intentional. Online and local co-op are both present, and playing with a partner transforms the messy combat into something more like a shared fever dream, which is its best version. Calappa Games went on to make Fight Crab, and you can feel that same unironic commitment to a ridiculous premise running through every reef in this game.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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