A Promising Game with Serious Rough Edges

DARKWATER shows a lot of promise, especially considering it's the work of a solo developer. The effort put into the game is clear, and there are several standout features. The submarine customization is a highlight, offering unique layouts and upgrades that set it apart from other survival games. The base also looks great and helps create a strong atmosphere. Visually, the game holds up well overall.

That said, the technical issues and design problems are hard to ignore. Performance is one of the biggest problems: firing the pistol causes the game to lag for a few seconds, pressing the M key also causes a huge stutter, and in general, the game just feels sluggish. Frame drops are frequent, and there’s no Vsync option. The graphics settings are too limited, and high settings seem to force motion blur with no way to disable it.

Combat is the weakest part of the game. Weapons like the sledgehammer don’t have any noticeable effect on enemies—there’s no stun, no reaction, and enemies often just walk behind you while ignoring hits. Fighting smaller enemies like the crab is frustrating because of the short range, you always take damage. The lack of crouching or jumping makes this worse. One enemy even walked through a closed cell, and another (a centipede) just missed its attack and went away. Enemies don’t even have death animations, most just stop moving.

There are also some missing or unfinished features. Lowering the water level in areas has no animation; it just happens instantly. Inventory sorting is not available, which becomes annoying quickly. The limited cargo space also becomes a problem, especially since fuel is so scarce. You end up spending nearly all your money on fuel at shops, which leaves little room for other upgrades or supplies.

DARKWATER has a solid foundation and some genuinely interesting ideas, but the current state of the game makes it hard to fully enjoy. With fixes to the combat, better performance, and some quality-of-life improvements, it could be something special. For now, it’s worth checking out if you’re curious, but be prepared for rough patches.

I really want to recommend this game but sadly, in its current state, I cant. Please keep working on the game, there is loads of potential there!

It does something I've wanted to see for a while. It takes the game FTL: Faster Than Light and tries to creatively apply its mechanics into a first person multiplayer experience.

However, I feel it's limited by a few things and I want to go over each of them.

Taking the ship combat mechanics straight from FTL is a good idea. Picking your ships weapons and choosing what they each target on cooldown is great. But you've neglected a QoL feature of FTL: The ability to Shift select multiple weapons, or click and drag for those who prefer mouse and keyboard.

Melee PvE feels terrible and is on of the major reasons why I can't recommend the game. It feels totally unpolished and not fun. The blocking mechanic is inconsistent. At worst combat is reduced to simply trading blows with various AI, which all do nothing other than path toward you and attack nonstop. Friendly fire is very easy because the players do not collide with one another and you can attack a teammate very easily.

When a subsystem takes critical damage, I noticed it can completely disappear. Leaving a wall as if the room never existed. I find that to be a very weird and disorienting feature. Instead, consider rendering the room in a destroyed state with an un-patchable leak, and allow players to manually seal it off using a door.

Sorry to say the player's basic UI is pretty terrible. Unless I'm missing something, you can't organize your hotbar how you'd like, unless you finesse it by dropping and re-grabbing items items in order. The movement also feels pretty bad. I realize there's no necessity to crouch, but the lack of the feature makes the game feel incomplete. And in general it gives the game an unpolished feel. The AI and the movement both are the weakest points of this game. This contrasted with amazing 3d modeling and great animations is bizarre and jarring.

The voip was unusable for us. Which is a bummer since we like the idea of the immersion. It would lag and chop up our voices a lot. This may be due to post-processing effects on voice chat. Which is the subject of another issue we had - The ship intercom voice modification is too strong. It's very difficult or impossible to really hear what someone is saying over it. But we liked the idea, it's cool.
We agreed the music at the shops is also terrible, and I ended up just muting all music altogether in the menus. Please consider adding a radio with a toggle within the store so you can mute just that radio if you choose.

While I can't recommend the game, I'm going to leave a positive review for the sake of giving it the best chance at evolving into something better.

Definitely a hidden gem! Lots of fun with a group and scratches that Lethal Company itch.

It's got a huge amount of content for the price even in early access and I can already see lots of improvements since the playtest. Love the underwater setting.