This is simply one of the most unique games you'll play. I've had it since it came out years ago, and still hop back in from time to time to experience the carnage that is shark vs diver. While it's true that the game isn't in its prime, and hasn't been in a long time, there's still matches to be played. I started playing this again and often get matches within seconds of queuing up. Granted I have all regions and maps enabled, but it goes to show how you can still enjoy the game with randoms.
What I mainly like about this game is just how many ways a match can be played. Each map has different strategies you can employ for both teams that, alongside the various skills/equipment you can mix and match, provides a lot of variations each time you play. I highly recommend people just starting out to queue up as "Either" team and just play around with various builds and strats, because there's a decent amount of them. There are definitely meta strats, but don't worry about them at first.
The game also looks pretty good on the highest settings even by today's standards, and it plays at great framerates for me while rocking at best a mid-end build. It has a lot of knobs to adjust things though if you feel your system would struggle on high settings.
The only real negatives I can note are:
- The relatively high skill ceiling. The game is easy to pick up and play, but takes tens of hours to really start getting proficient with the basics to be competitive. At the time of writing this review I only have just over 100hrs, and I am far removed from the highly skilled players who have dedicated several hundred if not thousands of hours into this game.
- The vetted player-base of highly skilled players that new players will have to compete against. Many matches you'll play will have at least one max level player in the lobby, so all I can say is that if you're okay with learning through trial-by-fire then get ready for some burn. Most won't pull their punches, although several will teach you things if you ask. The game has some tight position and timing requirements to pull off attacks, especially as sharks, so understand that new players will be at a severe disadvantage if they're in a lobby of experienced players.
- There are some technical quirks of this being a bit of an older game. Firstly, the game launches with the default 32-bit executable, so if you're on any modern operating system then you'll want to add the 64-bit exe as a non-steam game so you can launch using that. It'll reduce or even eliminate problems you have with the game crashing. This is even more important if you run the game using Proton.
There are also some other little nit-picks I wish to mention:
- Your characters can lose all momentum on objects and terrain when you try to slide across them.
- Some environment objects have larger collisions than their visible mesh will have to believe.
- Certain shark skins make them significantly harder to spot in open waters, meaning there's a real discussion to be had about the game being pay-to-win depending on how you look at it.
- The lobby system has a few quirks with it, like non-lobby leaders not seeing when the group is queued up or at times requiring everyone be shown as online in Steam.
- While I personally get matches pretty quickly (often within seconds), it'll depend on your queue settings and the time of day that you try and play. I remember years back that sometimes it'd take 15 minutes or so to get a match for me, so it's not guaranteed that you'll have as good of luck for finding quick matches as I have recently. However, feel free to tab out of the game to do other things as the game has a global sound effect play even when minimized notifying you that a match was found.
For me, I think it's still worth the full asking price. If you can find it on sale or during some sort of free weekend, give it a try! The game was fairly recently acquired by a different dev team, and they've been updating it again while cryptically teasing that they have plans for the Depth franchise. No definitive answers as to what that might entail (console port with cross-platform matchmaking, or perhaps another game release?), but in any case this means that the game is already getting more love for it even after being out for so long. The game is actually seeing a bit of a revival in the community due to the new dev team's efforts as well as the recent Steam sale, so frankly there's no better time to hop in than right now!
