Dave The Diver Review

if you would have told me that one of the best games I'd play this year standing alongside juggernauts with mega million dollar budgets would end up being a retro Indie RPG where you play as an obese scuba diver who runs a sushi shop I would have believed you actually that sounds awesome and it is just like an actual ocean Dave the diver is beautiful at first glance but then you dive into it to find a vast wonderful world to explore just beneath the surface this waterlogged Adventure manages to exceed the expectations of an already hilarious premise with some of the most irresistible exploration Sim management and mini games I've seen in a long time that kept me completely glued to my seat for far more hours than I'd ever intended with characters and a story that are deceptively substantial and more content packed into it than I could have anticipated Dave the diver never stopped surprising me foreign [Music] story focuses on a lovable group of co-workers turned friends who open a sushi bar near the mysterious Blue Hole that's a seemingly magical stretch of water known to change its terrain and aquatic ecosystem every day you play as the titular Dave himself a rotund soda-chugging diver who begrudgingly caters to the whims of everyone in his life including the occasional bossy sea creature what follows is an endearingly silly tale involving a secret society of merfolk some really aggressive Wildlife protection enthusiasts and dozens of people making very rude comments about your character's weight oh but while it comes off a bit shallow at first the story shockingly develops into something more substantial characters are far more complex than their pixelated faces initially suggest even after more than 30 hours I still find myself eager to spend times with the likes of boncho the stoic Fearless sushi chef and Duff the anime obsessed neck-bearded gunsmith it certainly helps that many characters are given Goofy and memorable cutscenes every time you interact with them like this one [Music] [Music] I've seen them all dozens of times at this point and yet I refuse to skip them they're just that good but this is not just an amusing Adventure RPG it comes with a surprisingly deep restaurant management Sim baked into it you'll split your time between diving into the dangerous depths of the Blue Hole to hunt for fish and supplies battle wet foes and complete quests while also managing a sushi shop by crafting recipes cooking hiring and training employees and dealing with an extremely fussy clientele [Music] diving into the Blue Hole is where the literal and figurative meat of the adventure happens you'll use a harpoon guns and Nets to capture and kill fish to be turned into Sushi and explore ever deeper inevitably leading to action-packed confrontations with aggressive sharks navigating ancient ruins filled with simple puzzles and fighting off over-the-top bosses like a massive hermit crab using a monster truck as a shell tracking down and collecting all manner of sea life is a compelling and zen-like game of hide and seek where you're rewarded for bringing your Quarry down with as little Brute Force as possible by mastering Dave the diver's simple but satisfying combat swimming around with guns blazing like The Life Aquatic with John Wick will get the job done quickly but your shoddy work yields minimal usable resources for your restaurant using your Harpoon or better yet Nets or tranquilizer darts to bring fish in alive is much more beneficial but trickier that trade-off gives you plenty of ways to succeed depending on your preference and what you think you can pull off what the tools you're given fighting silly enormous bosses and solving simple press that switch to open that path puzzles offers a nice change of pace from spear fishing even if both are too easy to provide any kind of meaningful Challenge and no difficulty options are available to bump it up there's definitely some very cool novelty in taking down a giant squid at the bottom of the ocean but since nearly every boss can be killed very quickly by learning their pattern and hitting them three times the break from the norm is usually short-lived similarly while the plot developments that are usually involved in story heavy puzzle sections are usually worth the trouble the actual puzzles are mostly effortless busy work look at this I bet you already know how to solve it in between Dives you'll make worthwhile upgrades to your gear that make your excursions more profitable and improve your combat Effectiveness there are tons of useful stuff like making your oxygen tank bigger refining your swimsuit so you can dive deeper increasing your inventory space and crafting and upgrading your weapons to deal more damage and apply status effects like poison and nonsensically fire to your underwater foes that's not how Fire Works Dave all of these require increasing quantities of resources generated by capturing fish and driving up profits from your sushi business and create creates a loop that is truly hard to walk away from I can't tell you how many times I promised myself one more dive before then rationalizing to myself well I gotta wrap up the date the sushi shop then I'll stop then repeating those empty promises for hours on end like a true spreadsheet Lover's Dream running an exotic sushi bar requires you to master numerous disciplines there's Gathering materials hiring and training your staff nurturing both an agricultural and a fish farm learning recipes and upgrading your menu and more watching sales charts climb and building a better business is a dopamine hit that kept me up late into the night and repeatedly drove me back into the ocean to collect ingredients especially once the complexity of my business swelled to insane proportions when my success required me to open a branch location the Bonkers amount of depth and planning that goes into preparing for a single night of slinging Sushi awoke my inner entrepreneur like few games have wait should I open a sushi bar in real life oh my God are we really doing this perhaps Dave the diver's best quality though is in how it nearly constantly keeps throwing new ridiculous stuff off at you as if spear fishing and restaurant management weren't enough on their own you'll also get into gambling aquatic photography seahorse racing raising a Tamagotchi inspired digital pet concert going Rhythm games and at least 20 other absurd things I wouldn't want to spoil whether you're exploring the Blue Hole as you hunt for an elusive shark or hanging out with myrrh people Dave the diver lives up to the adventure game genre by absolutely never being predictable throughout its entire duration it's truly impressive that even in the story's closing hours I was still being introduced to new mechanics some of which had caused the already habit-forming Rabbit Hole to grow ever deeper there's even an entire section where you're suddenly thrown into a visual novel that fleshes out the backstories of some of the cast moments like that are just such a treat not all of the gambles Dave the diver takes are successful if they were they wouldn't be gambles and sometimes you you'll end up playing some haphazardly thrown together minigame that feels like it could have been left on The Cutting Room floor for example in one part of the story you suddenly find yourself playing a half-baked 2D stealth game that has you hiding behind crates and lurking in freezers as you wait for brain dead guards to slowly walk by the good news is that these misses are extremely brief and even when one didn't land with me I was at least amused that the bizarre diversion was included at all foreign the last thing to note is that despite a generally insane level of Polish likely brought on by its tenure as an early access game Dave the diver does have some bugs it's yet to work out sometimes my UI would disappear locking me out of doing things like managing my farm and sometimes enemies or objects in the environment would become intangible and a few times the frame rate would randomly tank itself while it was hanging out in one particular area the sea village these issues weren't common enough to make me not want to keep playing this alarmingly compelling game but they pretty significantly annoyed me when they happen it definitely sucked for example when one boss randomly became Invincible during our fight and I had to start the whole dive over [Music] Dave the diver is a tremendous and Unforgettable RPG Adventure that I can't put down the story and characters are full of heart and charm the underwater exploration and restaurant management are easy to lose time to and the sheer number of weird mini games and other surprises that are packed into this 30-hour adventure ensure things never grow stale even with wimpy bosses simple puzzles and a fair number of bugs Dave the diver has so many other interesting and intriguing things going on that it's easily one of the best games I've played this year so far for more check out our reviews of Final Fantasy 16 and the Harvest Moon remake story of Seasons a Wonderful Life and for everything else stick with IGN [Music]

Channel: IGN

Views: 842,035

Keywords: Adventure, Dave the Diver, MintRocket, PC, ign review, game review, dale the diver, dale the diver review, dale the diver game review, dale the diver ign review, ign

Id: 284XKh1lFHM

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023