Everyone is a boat in this 'MOBA meets Vampire Survivors' game inspired by a Warcraft 3 mod

A warship painted to look like a shark fires all guns. — (Image credit: Lunchbox Entertainment Inc.)

All these years later, the Warcraft 3 modding scene is still producing fully fledged games.

The mod Battleships is sort of like a take on DOTA, but instead of RPG-style heroes, players pilot upgradable warships afloat in watery labyrinths. The big shakeup is that your weapons fire themselves, so any harassment and creep farming will take care of itself while you steer the ship and manage cooldowns.

Weapons come in all varieties, and they don't all just blast opponents away. For instance, the Over Clocker speeds up your cooldowns every time it fires, and the Trench Maker fires out a hook familiar to MOBA veterans with trauma from Dota's Pudge or League's Blitzcrank. Combined with dozens of ships and captains, which come with their own active abilities and passive modifiers respectively, Sirocco's loadouts offer a lot of variety for a MOBA just starting out.

It's not the first MOBA to sacrifice legacy mechanics like last-hitting so players can get right to the teamfights, but it's a less radical reinvention than games like Battlerite and Supervive, both of which forego the lane setup entirely. It feels a bit more like I imagine DOTA did before the age of fine-tuned balance: tower-pushing, gank-centric bedlam with loose roles and nonsensical team compositions. The mod DNA really shines through, in other words.

Sirocco's promise of "creativity as meta" is perhaps a bit optimistic—I've never met a competitive game players couldn't wring a tier list out of—but it's fun to get swept up in during these first few days.

Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.