Coast Guard fails at everything it attempts, and yet I couldn’t not play it for hours on end to completion. The game bills itself as a Coast Guard simulator, but that is a really large stretch. Yes, you do captain a Coast Guard Cutter in some generic Coast Guard from a nondescript nation, but that’s about the extent of the simulation aspect of the game. If anything, Coast Guard is a more traditional game than anything else, focusing on a main story that plays out in a number of ridiculous flashbacks set to the most soap opera like story I’ve ever seen in a video game. Coast Guard, while intriguing, is a game that is at odds with itself, not ever knowing what kind of game it really wants to be. Are you looking for an accurate Coast Guard simulation; this isn’t it. Are you looking for a traditional adventure game; Coast Guard only hits that at the most basic of levels.
Gameplay consists of you taking control of Finn, captain of a Coast Guard ship that is on patrol duty in a very small area of play. While we are technically on the ocean, it feels more like we are puttering about a really large lake more than anything as there is very little space to move about. Your ship is easy enough to control using the traditional W,A,S,D control scheme, but you also have the option to use the onscreen controls via the mouse for a bit more precision and accuracy. The problem is that you’ll probably never use these onscreen controls as the the game rarely requires any precision at all. Those onscreen controls actually feel like they would be more suited to a mobile version of the game than a PC edition. It’s also one of the reasons I could never really get completely into Coast Guard as it never really felt like a simulator of a seafaring ship.
You’ll quickly find out that the game is more concerned with nonsensical missions and lone wolf tactics than any sort of simulation of any kind. Sure, you can rescue people that fall in the water, running them over as mush as you like, put out fires with your ships water cannons, and render basic aid to ships, but in the entire course of the game you’ll only do each of those things maybe on two occasions each. Instead the game takes you off the ship to explore two locations, that right, only two locations. You will flashback/forward to a pirate ghost ship you are stuck on (um, what?) and to an oil-rig that is the only physical location in the game. The ghost ship is always barren, but the oil rig section see you walking around and interacting with characters that look like a generation behind the graphics of the rest of the game. It’s here where Coast Guard turns into, essentially, a point-and-click adventure game.
The puzzles that are presented to you are downright silly and many don’t offer a very logical format, choosing to be more obtuse in the vain of the old Sierra games than requiring logical thinking. A lot of the puzzle and interaction issues arise from the fact that characters don’t offer much in the way of helpful advice or hints. You will find yourself just wandering around a few small locations until you find the right item and use it in some ridiculous way. I put nearly 15 hours into the game, but most of that time was spent trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do, or restarting a mission because the game bugged out for whatever reason. Many times characters would revery back to old conversation topics, even when the game pushes the story forward. If you check out the Steam forums you’ll find dozens of posts with people stuck on the oil-rig, the only major location of the game.
Graphically Coast Guard is again at odds with itself. The water looks pretty amazing, and paddling about the very small ocean never gets old, even if I wish there was more to do. The problem is that while the water looks beautiful, it doesn’t at all act much like water. Instead, your ship, and any vessel around you end up only displacing the water around your vessels as if there was an invisible barrier around said ship. The best way I can explain it is that the water acts more along the lines of mercury. Your ship, and its daughter boat, also look fantastic from the outside, but when you are forced to wandering around below deck things get pretty ugly. Going below deck on any vessel is a mess as the game decides to toss massive amounts of fog around for a few seconds before going completely dark before the light sources kick in. Characters themselves are also really ugly when compared to even the few bland locations. They look bad, and would barely be considered above the level of the PlayStation 2.
Coast Guard tries to tell a mystery story about ghost ships, refugees, murder, and betrayal, but that is at odds with the simulator aspect of the game. It’s not that the silly story and atrociously bad voice acting isn’t ‘so bad it’s good’ levels of fun, it’s that the game should really have been either about being a Coast Guard simulator –it fails at this– or a story focused adventure game. It’s a shame, because the engine that Coast Guard uses offers up just enough that a full fledged simulator would have worked well. The game looks great pulled back, and having a ton of different rescue missions and police work would have made for a really great time. Instead we are forced to play a sub-par adventure story that takes away from what makes the game a lot of fun.
“Coast Guard tries to tell a mystery story about ghost ships, refugees, murder, and betrayal, but that is at odds with the simulator aspect of the game”
Coast Guard
PC