Wow, what an annoying game. Wave Break seems really stylish and creative aesthetically, which it definitely is and its vibes are great. It’s a really cool premise and has great art and music. Unfortunately, once you play for 5 minutes you quickly realize it’s an unpolished, frustrating mess.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever played a game with clunkier control of movement than this—to begin with, more of the gameplay involves 3D platforming than actually boating/skating, and this is ironically easier to do running around on foot (with your character who, putting it generously, has the physics of a Fall Guys character) than with the boat. The boat feels so slippery to move, even on land, and there’s no option to change the control sensitivity. It’s so exasperating trying to go anywhere with the boat when so often you’ll slide just a little bit and end up falling off the ledge you spent 1 of your only 3 minutes in the level platforming to. The level design is also a buggy mess—there are so many places where you can get stuck in a tiny gap and be unable to move out, move in and out of weird geometry edges, or even clip through the floor and fall out of the map.
Further, a lot of the objectives are themselves very buggy. One of the objectives in the first level that requires doing a certain trick out of a window took an hour and a half of me repeatedly doing it before the game finally decided to recognize it. I was actually planning to refund the game (which I have never done before for any game) but this single objective took me so long that I ended up outside of the 2 hour refund window. I also got stuck for nearly an hour retrying the [spoiler]helicopter jump[/spoiler], the very last objective in the last level, because it would never let me grab it properly (and the first time it did was with only a few seconds left on the timer, and it made me restart even though I had finished the objective).
Then, there’s the skating tricks aspect of the game, which almost feels like an entirely separate game (though equally frustrating). I actually spent most of my hours in Wave Break just doing tricks in a corner of the first map, trying to get the 999,999 combo achievement and grinding money. While this was a little bit less obnoxious than the platforming objectives in the levels, it’s still very annoying since the game is really finicky about combos and it kept not triggering the correct tricks or ending the combo the instant I touched the water. There were also some input issues I had where the game would randomly make me jump without me pressing the button, instantly ending my combo.
Another major issue I had is that the game provides basically no information to the player, which is exacerbated by there being very few community guides or even videos of Wave Break online (if you are playing this game and get lost I highly recommend consulting Biglaw’s GDQ run from 2022). Firstly, aside from an extremely basic tutorial, the game provides zero information about the different types of tricks you can do, how they’re scored, and so on. In order to even have a chance at building up a decent combo, I had to more or less mash around while recording my gameplay with a gamepad viewer, then rewatch it frame-by-frame to figure out what button combos triggered what tricks, and even then, after hours of practice, I’m sure there’s a lot I still don’t know. That’s how opaque this game is about skating tricks, the exact thing you need to do to score points. Additionally, there’s one level with a collectible hidden behind a breakable rock wall, yet absolutely nothing in the game indicates that you can damage the environment at all. I spent two entire hours looking for this last collectible thinking my game was bugged before I found a single Steam community discussion where the dev told people to try breaking rocks—that’s the closest to a canon explanation you get.
I’m sure there are more things I’m forgetting, but I hope by now a theme is clear—as much as I love the style of Wave Break, it feels like there was absolutely no polishing or playtesting of the gameplay or player experience, as it’s incredibly confusing, clumsy, and buggy. I can think of very few other games that are as actively frustrating and un-fun as Wave Break was, so I’d really recommend steering clear of this game despite its creative premise and atmosphere.
