Shrimp Game Key Art
Image: GasGod Games, GLUE MAN & Gigatank 3000

Following on from the modest success of prologue demo Shrimp Game: Krill Confirmed (which is still available and fun), we're ready to take a deeper dive into the finished game today. Shrimp Game: Overkrill isn't just a game with a great title. It's a fun, free-flying (well, swimming) arcade looter-shooter with full online co-op and PvP. It's also about tiny little shrimp blasting their way through a hostile ocean full of weird aquatic monsters and even weirder jokes. So, Borderlands meets SpongeBob, if we're being reductive.

Fortunately, we're not reductive at all, and we resent the implication. Shame on you! Silly as the concept is, Shrimp Game is a legit, very fun 6-degree-of-freedom shooter with some light RPG mechanics. You are the pilot of a Submersible Hydrodynamic Research Integrated Marine Platform (SHRIMP), tasked by a menacing talking mask underwater to restore balance to the deep by shooting a lot of fish, shelled or otherwise.

There are six classes of shrimp to pick from, each with their own stats and perks (and yes, the Pistol Shrimp is the best at shooting), and six elemental abilities to pick from, each giving you a cooldown-based utility skill and a big ultimate attack. But the majority of your firepower comes from the weapons dropped by enemies. You can carry three at once and switch between them freely, each with different firing patterns, properties, elemental perks, and all the other jazz you'd expect from a more serious RPG shooter hybrid.

There's some real buildcrafting shenanigans possible too once you get up to speed, with elemental fusions and wacky attacks that can pinball between targets. While that would be enough, the game also has full online co-op for up to six players and some old-school arena shooter PvP modes, so you can share this one with friends if you're not feeling shellfish.

Sorry

Okay, I'm not actually sorry about that one.

While not an early access release, Shrimp Game already has a full roadmap (waterway?) of upcoming features, with more shrimp classes coming by the end of the year, and some new multiplayer modes (including the fascinating-sounding 'capture the turtle' and 'shrimpatholon') coming in early 2027, along with a hardcore perma-death mode for the main campaign. Not quite all-you-can-eat shrimp, but at least a second serving.

Shrimp Game devs GasGod Games aren't done being weird, either, with two more games still on the way. The chaotic and squishy Kirby-meets-Nubby number-scrungling roguelike Boing Boing Bros and multiplayer PvEvP bullet hell arena-shooter God Of The Arena Dungeon.

Shrimp Game: Overkrill is out now for £10.75/$12 with a 20% launch discount running until September 10th. And again, the demo, Krill Confirmed, is still available and free to try... Hrm... You ever think about how shrimp are just underwater bugs, and yet we eat them by the bucketload?