I had hopes for Super Raft Boat Together. Not high hopes; if the game wasn’t good, my year wasn’t going to be ruined. And likewise, Super Raft Boat Together didn’t pop my hopes like a balloon. It just sort of deflated them, like a bouncy house at the end of a birthday party. It was still fun to climb around, at least for a bit. But eventually it’s just a bunch of sad plastic, and you have to leave.
Super Raft Boat Together is a multiplayer top-down roguelite. The game’s twist on the genre is that instead of going through multiple rooms and challenges, the staging area is a raft. Said raft is apparently made of cake given the speed and ferocity with which it’s devoured by sharks and other denizens of the ocean if they aren’t shot before they reach it.
Mechanics
The structure on the whole is simple. Start a run, enter a zone. Fight off two waves of enemies, then fight a boss. After each boss, visit a shop and buy upgrades. After the final boss, start over.
Before I sink Super Raft Boat Together, I do want to say some nice things. The music is fantastic, and I love it. One of my favorite songs is used in this trailer. The actual gunplay and movement is pretty decent. I don’t love it as much as I love the music, but it’s not where my primary problem with the game comes from.
I have two zones of issue with Super Raft Boat Together, and how they intersect. Those zones are the roguelite mechanics, and the boss design.
Issues
Let’s start with the roguelite mechanics. I have a bunch of minor complaints here, so I’ll start with those. The game is pretty vague about what exactly its upgrades do, and to what extent. For example, one upgrade is “Chance to shoot fire bullets.” This is incredibly unhelpful. What’s my chance to shoot a fire bullet? If I get multiple stacks of that upgrade, is the chance to set them on fire additive or multiplicative? Or is it non-existent? Do fire bullets set enemies on fire, and if so, does that fire damage stack? Or do they just do extra damage?
Compare this to something like Hades, or Risk of Rain 2, both games where items have explicit and defined properties, with delicious numbers included. (In Risk of Rain’s case, those numbers are on an inventory screen, but they’re still in the game!) Those numbers are important, because there’s a big difference between “+1% chance to deal critical damage” and “+25% chance to deal critical damage.” But Super Raft Boat Together doesn’t make this distinction, and this makes trying to create a build incredibly difficult, because very few items are explicit in their function.
It’s also not helped by what I’d describe as inconsistent or undefined terminology. A large portion of the game is building out the raft to provide space to maneuver during a run, but Super Raft Boat Together uses both the phrases “build speed” and “build rate” when talking about the rate at which the character generates raft pieces to place. Are they interchangeable? Are they different stats, and if so, which is which? I can’t tell from playing.
Both of these design choices make it much harder for me to engage with what I’ve always found to be a large portion of what makes roguelites fun: creating builds with synergies between various items.
The other thing that makes this difficult is that many of the items in Super Raft Boat Together don’t feel designed to be synergistic. There are very few items that scale off of other stats that can be influenced. My favorite example of this would be an item called Spectral Hammer. It’s only active when the player has died in a multiplayer run. In that case, it doubles their ability to place temporary ghost planks.
It has zero synergy with anything else in the game. I’m not even sure there are other items that buff being a ghost, and frankly, being a ghost is pretty useless. Better then nothing! But mostly useless.
So now, bosses, and boss design. I have several different categories of problems with the bosses in the game. Let’s start with the simplest ones: they’re pretty boring, there aren’t many variants, and several bosses share almost identical patterns (looking at you Giant Jellyfish, Giant Fish, and Giant Pufferfish). In addition, several of the boss fights aren’t boss fights. They’re just an extra wave of enemies. Shark Swarm, Ghost Swarm, and Fish Swarm aren’t bosses. They’re just an extra third wave fight.
The biggest problem I have, though, is with the game’s final boss, the Super Kraken. The Super Kraken is not incredibly difficult. However, it does something most of the other bosses don’t: it absolutely shreds every inch of your raft.
This would be mostly just annoying if it wasn’t for one mechanic I haven’t talked about yet: mercenaries and pets.
Mercenaries are hired with coins. Coins are added to a total between runs, but not kept between runs. Pets are bought with cash. Both mercs and pets are valuable sources of DPS, but like the player, they can’t shoot if they’re not on a raft. They also can’t build rafts, and pets will just float away if they get knocked off somehow.
Unlike most other bosses, the Kraken will absolutely kill your raft, and kill mercs because it attacks a lot more of the screen (many other bosses will just actively target human players). This means that by the time the game loops, most of the raft is destroyed, all the mercs and pets are usually dead, and everyone is hanging on by a thread.
Which brings up another problem: there’s no shop after killing the Super Kraken. Instead, each player gets three free items, one of the highest rarity, and two more of variable rarities. Except many of those items won’t be damage items, and the second round vastly increases the number of foes, while also vastly buffing their health.
End result: It’s incredibly difficult to come out of the Super Kraken fight in a good position to continue the run, even if every player has full health.
It’s also hard to think of a reason to want to continue the run. The enemies are re-used, just with more of them. The bosses are actually now easier than the base waves.
Conclusion
Super Raft Boat Together isn’t awful, but none of its pieces click together. It falls flat on key parts of what makes a roguelike compelling for me, lacking both interesting boss variation, and meaningful and compelling build synergy. If you need a one time thing for game night, it’s fine, but I wouldn’t recommend it in many other situations.
If you’re still interested, you can find Super Raft Boat Together here on Steam. And you can yell at me for my bad opinions here, on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter.