Ace of Seafood
Nintendo Switch

Developer: Nussoft
Publisher: Onuki Masafumi
Category: Action, First Person, Role-Playing, Strategy
Release Date: 02.22.2018

Playability

Plays well in docked, handheld and tabletop arrangements.
Works fine with both joycon and pro controllers.

Become the Ace of Seafood

Ace of Seafood by Nuusoft for Nintendo Switch is quite a unique game. The story or lack thereof is as follows “It is the future. The human mind is separate from the body, but has not yet forgotten forms of life”. What this means i could not tell you. But guess what, that’s not really important, because as it turns out your just here to fight some fish and fight some fish you will.

You start by picking which type of starter sea life you are most like. You get five choices at the get go but gain many more as you progress, gaining bigger and more powerful aquatic denizens to command. After selecting your choice you go through your typical tutorial stage teaching you the controls and giving you the gist of what you should be doing.

What your doing is fighting fish for control over different sections of reef. Each reef is controlled by a group of some kind of sea life or in a few cases battleships. After defeating the defending group you gain control of the reef and gain the DNA of said creatures. After gaining enough DNA of a species you can then breed them and incorporate them into your squad. You can have up to five other sea creatures in your attack group ranging from shrimp to great white sharks. Generally the stronger your squad the bigger and badder things you can take on.

Each type of creature controls differently, bigger things usually slower and more powerful and vise versa and they come with a range of attacks ranging from lasers to single shots and physical attacks. These all vary from creature to creature and finding ones you like will take some trial and error. Speaking of trial and error your probably going to have a hard time in the beginning trying to figure out what to do. Ace of Seafood can be a pretty tough game. After the brief tutorial the game just throws you in with little idea of what your supposed to be doing.

You will probably get lost. The map is a decent size and feels even bigger considering the amount of times your going to spend getting wrecked by a group of mackerels or some other similar seemingly non threatening thing. There is also a good chance you will need awhile to adjust to the controls as they can be a little wonky. It plays a little like Ace Combat, and i think they know it given the title.

There is also some light resource management to be done in Ace of Seafood. You have an hit point, food and stamina gauge. To keep your HP and food meter full all you need to do is attack and kill other creatures, even small defenseless things like sponges and clams give you hp and and food once destroyed. The stamina gauge refills itself gradually on its own.

Ace of Seafood suffers from a few technical problems. You will see pop in, low draw distance and boundary breaking clip through. I several times broke through the barrier of the world and went “out of bounds”. In ace of seafood however you are not limited by this. At one point i swam for a good ten minutes in one direction in a sea of emptiness before turning around. I did find other sea life trapped in the void, but they could not attack me back. This was entertaining for awhile but lost its appeal quickly. This can be quickly fixed though by swimming back through and boundary wall in the game world.

I also discovered the ability to work my way up cliff faces. Think Skyrim or a similar open world game where they try to limit the play space by putting unclimbable mountains before you, only you do try to climb it by jumping repeatedly up its surface. The same thing is applied here only with fish. See me below soaring in the air like a majestic flying fish. Which ironically is not one of the many lifeforms you can control in the game.

Finding Treasure In a Shipwreck

Ace of Seafood is a little rough around the edges with technical blips and somewhat last gen graphics. However if you know what your getting yourself into with this bizarre game you are bound to have a good time with regardless as i did. I got a solid fifteen hours out of this game and had fun every minute after the initial learning curve. So if your looking for something quite unlike anything you’ve played before and can deal with its flaws i say Ace of Seafood is one you shouldn’t throw back.