Lazy River [Preview]: Whatever floats our boats

We jump into the inner tubes in this new co-op waterpark game

I love lazy rivers. Every time we’re at a water park it’s likely the place I’ll end up for roughly 85% of our time there. I can just float and do nothing, randomly bouncing off of people or walls or drifting through a fake waterfall. That’s not the case with the *game* Lazy River, because there are zombies at this water park and they won’t leave us in peace to float.

Lazy River is a 1-4 player co-op game in which we need to build up rafts, shoot zombies with water guns, and collect craftable resources to build our rafter bigger and shoot MORE zombies with water. It’s a game about being on the river, but instead of relaxing our goal is surviving.

The demo we try at Summer Game Fest is more educational than anything, as both of us at SideQuesting need to learn the ropes of survival before we can actually manage it. Though the game will have multiple water-themed biomes the one we’re in now is a simple park with a long river and trees on either side. To kick things off we first need to grab some inner tubes that are floating around, convert them into a resource and stick them together, creating a much larger vessel. The raft is first one tube, then can be a 2×2 square, then 9×9 and more, and in any shape we choose in between. We opt to make ours wider in the back and tapering towards the front, like a giant V to cut through the waves. Realistically this gives us both a vantage point at the front as well as a smaller area for the zombies to climb onto, while the wider back is where we’ll house our crafting table.

And yes, there’s a crafting table. With sharp things. On an inflatable boat! What’ll they think of next!

As our boat slowly drifts we spot storage houses amongst the trees, hopping off to raid them for tools and items and then chopping down the trees nearby with an axe to grab some necessary lumbar. Chopping takes a few steps, because not only do we have to cut down the tree but also break it apart into pieces and then collect those pieces, all eating away at our crucial seconds when the undead are nearby. That’s why we keep one of us on the boat to protect it while the other grabs resources, and then switching at the next river turn. The zombies come in waves, so we need to be ready to shoot shoot shoot.

As the prime explorer on our team I’m usually out the longest, but that also means I’m the most susceptible to being separated from the raft. And, that’s what happens. I’m chopping down trees before I realize just how far away I am from my teammate, and start to run to catch up. It’s then that I get ambushed, dying so very near to the boat that I could taste the chlorine. Poor Sam is left alone to fight and craft, but he doesn’t last that long either. Whoops!

Lazy River is a unique take on the co-op adventure genre, and unlike in other games there seems to be way more of a reliance on working together. It may be especially fun for longer runs, as the payoff really starts to come later in the session once we’re much more situated. This may be one of the games where having the maximum four players on a team is optimal to be able to manage doing several tasks at once.

There’s no relaxing in this pool, but there may just be a few inner tubes with zombies in them. There is no release date yet for the game.