You know how concept art is always way cooler than the final product? I’m thinking about the glorious pieces of artwork featuring Jack-Jack as a hideous hairy monster throughout the first The Incredibles movies, Obi-Wan and Anakin teaming up to fight a giant lava monster during their confrontation on Mustafar or Thor fighting Jormungander, the World Serpent instead of travelling to Nidavellir in Infinity War. All of these examples take some mind-blowing preliminary concept art and, as it’s developed into the final article, strip away everything that makes it charming and beautiful. There are obvious reasons why this happens in movies but when it comes to video games where you can use whatever art style you feel like, why not stick with that incredible concept art? Well, welcome to Aquamarine, a game that decided its aesthetic would be to take the concept art, bundle it into a design document and run for the hills.

Aquamarine’s art style sits somewhere between concept art and pop art, with every frame of the game looking like a hand-drawn sketch with incredibly vivid colours. I go on about how good games look an awful lot in these reviews but feel free to assume every game I’ve complimented on its appearance looks like absolute garbage compared to Aquamarine. Every frame of the game looks holy-cow-gorgeous (not that a religious bovine would look particularly good, but you get my meaning). It’s genuinely breathtaking. You might look at the screenshots around this review and think they look ‘just okay’ which is maybe a fair comment on them as pieces of art but when you experience them as a living, breathing world, their beauty is elevated exponentially. This stunning art style is paired brilliantly with a calm and twinkly soundtrack that makes the whole affair incredibly relaxing.

But enough about the game as art, what is it like to play? It’s pretty damn good. Aquamarine is a survival and exploration game but it’s not quite like any of those that you’ve played before. It’s the most chill survival game in the world. You play as an astronaut whose name I did not catch so I’m going to call her Cindy. Cindy has crash-landed on a Kamino-like watery planet and needs to reach her crashed ship. She can do that by diving through the water in her amphibious pod whose name I did not catch so I’m going to call it Poddy. With your help, Cindy and Poddy will explore the ocean floor to find fuel and food for their journey, acquire upgrades from scattered floppy disks and avoid taking damage from the grumpier ocean inhabitants.

The chillness of the game comes from the slow pace and emphasis on thinking before acting. When you boot up the game, the first thing you meet is a screen telling you to play without distractions, to take your time and make thoughtful decisions. It’s the absolute antithesis to your standard survival game set in a murky wasteland where you spend your first night crying in a hole you’ve dug in the ground. The game is loosely turn-based so nothing is going to happen in the world until you’ve decided what action you want Cindy to take. This makes the game really attractive to me as it’s something you can switch on for a few hours at a time and lose yourself in. If you subscribe to the idea that games are for relaxation (AKA the correct idea) then this is definitely something for you.

The majority of the game is movement-based so you can decide which section of a grid you want to visit to avoid monsters and pick up food and fuel. The more fuel you acquire the more you can move and the further from the island you can stray, moving between sections of the map using your long-range engines. You can also move up to the surface of the ocean to help you manoeuvre around tricky obstacles and dangerous enemies. The control panel you’ll use for all of this is a delightfully retro-sci-fi affair. It’s all very original series Star Trek with satisfying clicky buttons, meters and transitions to secondary control panels. Once you unlock further abilities, you’ll have more controls, such as an ability to smash into things, doing damage to enemies and loosening fuel from deposits. You’ll also travel back to your original island often where you can perform upgrades on Poddy and rest in your garden before starting on your next adventure. The gameplay matches well with the theming of the whole game – it’s stripped-back, simple and relaxed.

I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t mention a couple of flaws in the game. It is very glitchy. I found a lot of buttons didn’t work until you tried them a few times or left the menu and went back into it, and a big blue rectangle kept appearing over the screen that stopped you from interacting with the game at all until you quit and rejoined. I’m writing this on release day so I’m sure these things will be fixed in good time but if you are thinking about picking it up (which I do recommend) you might want to wait a few weeks and check the bug fixes before you do.

Aquamarine is a delightful time. Calm, beautiful and compelling, it’s the perfect way to calm down and switch off after a long day at work, like a hot bath or a cold beer. There is so much going for the game that I’ve not mentioned here: Cindy’s brilliant narration, random risk-reward choices, the adorable seal monsters and so much more. If you like survival games but wish they were fun, Aquamarine might be worth a fair chunk of your time.

With an inviting cartoon visual style and high-paced gameplay Windjammers 2 is a blast that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. This might be more down to a name that looks like it’s been jammed through a Japanese-English translator and sounds more like a breaking wind prevention method rather than a 2D frisbee game. A good amount of fun can be had in short bursts though, by yourself or with others, regardless of how much noise you make – public or not.  

A joyful explosion of bright colour greets you from the go and an upbeat soundtrack with a strumming bass and screaming guitars, like something pulled out of a 90s SEGA arcade title, blasts through your headphones, which appeals to the child in me that never wanted to leave the arcade, always wanting one last attempt. 

The gameplay uses a mix of table hockey and volleyball to arrive at its addictive frisbee formula. A 1v1 system provides a volleyball net and spike-based gameplay, walls allow for ricochet shots and goals spanning the length of each end.

It sounds relatively simple, but there is a multitude of ways to try and beat your opponent, meaning that games feel unique enough to enjoy extended playthroughs. Each throw fills up a power meter which increases the power of your throw and can be used for your special move when full. Disks can ricochet off objects on the midcourt net, can deflect into the air for you to jump and spike as well as other methods to get the disk in the other end other than a simple throw. 

The format of the match ensures the action is also relatively brief, with best-of-3 sets and first to 15 points in each making them as tense as they can be fast. In fact, it’s these short matches that really bring everything together and push the pace. Like that overzealous game of table hockey with your buddies where the disk flies off the table and nearly hits a stray child, there is barely room for you to blink with competitors letting shots fly all over the place. The moment when you start to really pick up the game is a great feeling as you can turn the tide on a match that you are losing by double digits and on a dwindling clock.   

Adding to the retro stylings of the title is a clear Street Fighter influence which is really quite appropriate based on the intensity of the matches feeling quite like a fighting game in its ebbs and flow and round-like sets. The story mode’s map, vs screens, as well as bonus rounds all make an appearance, but unfortunately, it doesn’t translate much in terms of substance as the bonus stages have no significance at all as there is no scoreboard to tally your scores.

I tend to be one of those gamers that takes a while to adapt to unusual control systems, and Windjammers 2 is definitely one of those that I had difficulty getting used to, with an unfortunate mix of inconsistent mechanics and unbalanced characters. 

The worst offender of these was the fact that I could never consistently predict how fast my throws were going to be. There are two ways to see the frisbee leave your hands at an increased rate – a full power meter and charging your shots by standing underneath a deflected frisbee – but there were still times, when unaffected by either, where I would throw a charged shot for no apparent reason. Regardless of whether it’s just poorly explained or a poorly implemented feature, not knowing why frustrates me to no end as it’s the key mechanic to the entire game. 

Adding to the difficulty of the title is just how precise you need to be with all the other abilities. Dashing, for example, is a very helpful ability to get you across court and is exactly what you need when trying to reach a frisbee launched in the air, but if you try to dash towards it too early you will simply skip straight passed it. 

The 12 character roster is host to a mix of characters with different speed/power stats (thin characters are fast but have little power while larger characters are the opposite) but I found the roster unbalanced as the larger characters take up enough of the court to negate any speed advantage and with their powerful throwing abilities it’s hardly a fair fight, so much so that I couldn’t even win a single game until I started using one of the bigger characters – even on easy mode.

It could be argued that this is just me being utterly useless at the game, rather than being any particular flaw, but there’s certainly no denying how tough it can be.

Windjammers 2 is a complete blast that excels in the same way that the original 1994 neo geo title did and with the local and online modes it really is an easy recommendation for fun pick-up-and-play evenings with others, but there are just a few niggling gameplay issues that prevent this from fulfilling its full potential.