AQUA - Naval Warfare, first got my attention when they started dropping screens and talking about the gameplay. I found out that it’s being made by Slovak studio Games Distillery. Since they’re only a few hours away from me I thought I would help them out.

I managed to get an early build of the game so I could start playing. Then I played for almost 2 hours and realized that this was going to be a winner. It’s not perfect, but the flaws are so minor that you might not notice them.

You take on the role of Captain Gray who is piloting a Cruiser in the Emperean Navy. With your help, the war with the Gotheans is recently ended and you take on a side mission (unapproved of course) to do a little treasure hunting. What you find is that there’s more afoot than simple peace talks.

The first thing you will notice in this game are the graphics. And you’ll notice them in that "Wow! Those are cool!" sort of way that we all like to do. They certainly put a lot of time and effort into them and aside from the rain drops being almost as large as your battleship, there’s nothing wrong with them. Both game engine graphics and the motion-comic-like cut scenes are superbly detailed and interesting.  Everything has a great level of detail and the only thing I wish was that we could zoom in to better appreciate them. The screenshots in this article do not do the game justice, but there’ll most likely be a trial version available for you to see first hand.

The sound is quite good as well. Even though the voice overs are a little flat as is the dialog they still help keep you involved in the game for the most part. It certainly could use some brushing up in that department, but it’s an XBLA title, they’re not getting the big names in writing and voice-acting. Still, it’s passable and thankfully, not overused.

The gameplay is a cool mix of shoot ’em up and squad based tactics as you are able to hire on certain squads to help you in some missions. The missions are goal-oriented and playing through a couple takes only a few minutes each. This makes for a great pick-up-and-play feel to the game.

It uses a standard 2-stick control scheme - move with the left, shoot with the right and the buttons are used for squad commands, torpedoes, special weapons and the like. There’s nothing clunky about them at all. Plus, they give you a great booster feature because who wants to sit around while you ship chugs from place to place right? Of course they also balanced that by your not being able to shoot while in boost mode. Fair enough.

The game will also feature multiplayer but unfortunately it looks like that at present it will only be local split screen. Aside from that it’s also got local leaderboards, achievements and looks like it will have some DLC at a later date, perhaps new maps and modes for multiplayer and missions for single player, there has been no word as of yet.

Overall, Aqua - Naval Warfare, set for release on XBLA next week (May 19), looks to be a stellar addition to both the shooter genre and the XBLA lineup. Check back next week or so for the full GDN review. I’ll refrain from making a sink or swim or sink your money pun... for now, mateys!