Darkwater Has The Makings Of A Wonderful Addition To The Extraction Genre

Editor's note: This is a continuous impression of Darkwater. As I play more and learn more about the systems in the game, I will update this accordingly.

A brand new extraction shooter with some good bones.

Developed by Targon Studios, Darkwater is the latest entry into the extraction shooter genre. Released yesterday, April 22, 2025, I was able to get my hands on it thanks to the good folks over at Playstack.

Let me be extremely clear about this: Darkwater is in early access and I want to stress the "early" part of that phrase.

Let's quickly talk about the premise of the game before I dive into my thoughts. You and up to three other friends are part of a crew manning a submarine in charge of collecting loot found at outposts. These outposts can be filled with killer oysters, bugs and enemy mariners looking to stop you from pillaging their wrecks.

Loot can come in many forms. While playing last night on ABouncyFerret's channel on Twitch (every Tuesday night at 8:30pm EST, come hang out!), we found weapons (knives, a sledgehammer), credits (currency), fuel, ammo, scrap and food. All of this has both utility and can be sold. For example: scrap can be used once you've had a workbench installed in your sub.

This is where you upgrade your submarine at the store

You sell items at the store's vending machine and purchase upgrades at the submarine terminal. Depending on your credits, you can install new rooms, buy fuel or weapons and upgrade your submarine's current dimensions to fit more rooms.

This allows some customization depending on what time of playstyle you're looking for. We didn't test many of the features on this because we were still quite new to the game, although we did expand our sub and added both a mine bay and a harpoon bay.

Like most extraction shooters, this is a rinse and repeat until the entire crew is dead. The thing is, there are other things out there that want you dead. Darkwater isn't just a "go to the next spot and loot" simulator. There are elements of another indie game that I love: Void Crew.

While piloting from one outpost to another, you'll come across various points on your sonar where you need to make a decision. This decision could be to try and silently move past pirates or ram them with your sub and engage them in combat.

Your sonar screen is how you move between points on the map.

These are the times that the crew comes in to play. Once you engage an enemy crew, the sub transitions into a mini game scenario. The pilot has to maneuver the sub to avoid landmines on the screen while another crew member mans the torpedoes and targets which systems on the enemy vessel to take down. While that is happening, another crew member with a wrench has to repair holes, the engine and help reload the torpedoes while your last crew member pumps out water.

It can get extremely hectic, especially when a crew is using proximity chat and not a discord chat.

The bones of this game are really good. After two hours, I felt like my crew finally worked out the kinks and started to get into a nice groove and we left our "easy" session with a brand new workbench, a hope and a dream.

With that said, there are some things in this game that should be implemented as soon as possible to make it more accessible for players. The first is either a push-to-talk option or a microphone indicator to let you know if you're speaking in the game. Proximity chat will be the best way to play this game, but the lack of indicators is frustrating. There is a mute option, but there's no indication that you're muted if you accidently fat finger the M key. When our crew launched the game, we began the session with "Hello, can you hear me?" over and over to make sure everything was working correctly. For a co-op game, I feel that this is something that must be implemented before launch.

You can scavenge fuel instead of paying for it, but you have to carry it back to the sub!

Performance is definitely something that will need to be worked on as Targon updates the game. I have quite a beefy setup (Ryzen 7 5800x, AMD 9700 GPU) and there were times where I'd transition from the sub to the outpost and the screen would hitch, or I'd mute myself and the screen would hitch. There is no option for vsync which means that this will just happen until some development is put into a performance patch.

Rooms within outposts all look the same which can be extremely disorienting. There were many times when the crew would split up and get lost in a labyrinth of shelving. I'd assume this will change with future updates.

The tutorial does a poor job explaining some vital parts of the game. When a crew member dies, they become a mouse and have to wait to be resurrected. The game doesn't explain how to resurrect that team member. While I was dead and mousing around, I had to look up on the steam discussion board how to revive teammates. We found out that you can buy them back at a store. This should be part of the tutorial.

No jumping. No crouching. Not a fan, but unsure if it is a design choice or not.

Despite these critiques or criticisms, I really enjoyed my time with Darkwater and I believe that it'll find some life on the indie circuit if Targon Studios continues to develop important features. It was not a game I was expecting to really enjoy, but the customization of the submarine and the importance of teamwork and communication is something I really latch onto.

If these are your kind of games and a $10 entry price doesn't bother you, I would suggest taking the plunge with Darkwater.

Four codes were provided by Playstack for this game. Despite this, the opinions and critiques from the author were not influenced in any way by the developer or publisher of Darkwater.