Recent reviews by M.A.D_J.A.C.K

Did you ever want to pilot a submarine? Did you ever wish to go to space? Did you ever dream about becoming a part of the crew in space? Have you ever dreamt of meeting alien creatures? Today I will show you why you should probably stop.

Welcome to Barotrauma.

Let’s start with a small history lesson.

Barotrauma is a game developed by Finnish studio “Undertow Games” which worked on a game since 2014, and did not abandon it, which is pretty impressive as to how many of good indie projects can get abandoned because of many reasons.

Game was released in its alpha state for free for players to playtest the game, in 2017 code was publicly released so that the players could mod the game, to make it even better, or easier in some aspects, some of the modded content even earned itself a place in the base game.

I personally never heard of it, and would almost never get to know this little rough gem, but I had one friend who found it on accident while looking for some good coop games, he found 2 submarine based coop games, one of these was Barotrauma in its 2017 alpha state.

To keep the long story short: We gathered some mates, played a whole bunch, and loved it, until at one point, the game stopped updating, which was quite sad, but later we found out that it actually released on steam, which was wonderful, a small studio reached this game dev dream of reaching this official support and having its own publisher advertising their product, good for them.

Now that we covered all we should know about the Game and the people who work on it, let’s take a look at the Game itself.

The game itself is one of its kind, since there is no sequel announced whatsoever, game is still supported and developed, so for now there is no need for that. This game is a bit of a niche, but it does not seem to be an issue for some people to still enjoy it for what it is. While the game is fun, it is not cult classic or anything like that, however the game can be proud to have sold around half a million copies on steam.

The game is set in a sci-fi setting of a space colonization, we happen to be placed into a depths of one of the Jupiter’s moons, Europa. Underneath the icy and irradiated exterior of the moon hides an entire ocean full of alien flora and fauna, all of which are seething with hatred towards anything man made.

While this is not anything new in terms of the world creation or gameplay, I like Barotrauma for its simple yet difficult and grim setting. In this game you are constantly reminded that you are not the lord of this place, but rather, you are at a mercy of it, and its inhabitants.

Most of your time in this game you will spend aboard your submarine, which is dark, grey and depressing, even the artificial lighting on the ship does not help to ease off the grim mood of the submarine which goes into deeps undiscovered by any man, doing missions for which you will get paid and then move on without a second thought.

Even the soundtrack for this game offers no respite, it is a strange collection of music, or more like tunes made using only the sounds you would hear while on a submarine, like sonar beeping or pieces of floating debris hitting the hull. Game offers anything else in terms of soundtrack, at least until one of the crew members reaches for one of the instruments available in game, playing simple songs on harmonica, accordion or guitar, it does help in establishing this thick dark climate which I enjoy in video games.

It’s simple, it’s dark and I love it.

And now, the cherry on top: Gameplay.

In this game you take a role of a submarine crewman and you try to survive with threats lurking all around you, in the form of your constantly degrading submarine or your own crew, either by their own incompetence or the traitors aboard the vessel.

You have few roles to choose from, but in this game, everyone can do everything, but classes allow you to be good at certain things.

For example, Captain is good at steering the submarine, Engineer is good at fixing electrical devices without getting shocked and burned by electricity and working with the ship’s reactor without overloading it and causing a second Chernobyl underwater, Mechanic is good at fixing the engine and welding the hull back into one piece after alien attack.

So as I said, everyone can do anything, but classes make you good at certain things.


Game has both singleplayer and multiplayer, while playing alone is difficult and demanding, the real game begins when you hop into a multiplayer game with other players. This is where the Game shows influence from one old game, in which similar things were common occurrence: Space Station 13. In Space Station 13 the content, the atmosphere and the entertainment all came from the same source: player interaction with the game, and barotrauma truly shows that it’s working in what it wanted to achieve.

Despite the game’s dark setting and atmosphere, the games can be quite silly and to prove it to you I can share a story of one of my multiplayer games, I will not say the names or nicknames, because I don’t want to upset any of the people in that game by revealing our shenanigans to some stranger, sorry.


There were 4 members in the travel named [PROJECT DROWNER] and here they are:


• Engineer: Heavily armoured Kleptomaniac armed with shotgun, rubber toy mallet to fend others off the reactor, accordion to annoy people with and a clown mask on his face to scare off the potential saboteurs.

• Captain: timid and shy “Leader” of our crew, who kept insisting on taking all of the things from all the wrecks he laid his eyes on, possibly also a Kleptomaniac, usually aimed a revolver at people who came to see him, just in case.

• Assistant: A newcomer with Napoleon complex who did not even have a few hours into the game, and thought that he could boss others around, for which he obviously got whacked on the head with the engineer's toy mallet.

• Mechanic: A welder who knew his job well, but in secret he was getting high off opium, ethanol and morphine he stole from the med bay when he thought no one was looking.

During our gameplay we had some fun times trying to survive big and small encounters with Fauna of the planet, from the small groups of mud raptors to colossal armoured jellyfish called molochs, however this was only the beginning of our exploits in the deep blue hostile sea.

Once we docked to the station we noticed one thing in terms of earning money, and after some rather unusual thought process, and some discussion, followed by democratic voting, Captain was now locked in workshop doing “Forced labor” in order to make tobacco on Engineer’s tobacco farm, which mere hour later was medbay.

After an hour of forced labor Captain was freed, and we were filthy rich, we kinda exploited the fragile economy of the video game. We used that money to make our submarine into a literal fortress, and arm our cannon into nuclear explosive rounds, which Assistant then used to kill the mechanic during the time he tried to fix the hull from the outside, he claimed it to be an accident, sure… Anyways, I'm losing track.

I got plenty more stories to tell, but the word count is already reached, so I will have to wrap this up.



Would I recommend Barotrauma to other people? Yes, yes I would, despite its relatively high price of 21 pounds, this game will keep you entertained for plenty of time, either with basic gameplay which is continuously updated, or modded gameplay which can add twice as much content, as well as some fixes to what people think should be in a basic game.

I love everything about this game, the climate, the feel, the silliness, the depressing mood, everything in this game just clicks for me, so I highly recommend you try it out too.

This would be it for this review, I hope you are as sold on Barotrauma as I once was, thank you for reading this review, have a good one.