Just like Twitter used to be (and still is to a point), I’m finding a thriving indie dev community in full force in BlueSky, and it is helping me find some real hidden gems. Tuna Hake’s Underwater is a comedic take on the Tony Hawks Pro Skater series, particularly in its early days. If you wanted to swap out a human for a fish, and tricks for fin flapping and tail spins, then this is a frantic and chaotic game for you.
Tuna Hake’s Underwater has a total of 16 fish across three water environments – ocean, pool, and island. Most of the fish need to be unlocked and they all come with slightly different stats for their top speed and strength. Whilst every fish can do any trick or move in the game, some might have more speed to jump out of the water faster and higher, but they’ll be trickier to control. The game starts off with one minute on the clock for the player to score as many points as possible. There are plenty of 15-second pick-ups to swim or fly through (even rail grind through if you are skilled enough), and speed boosts can be triggered too.
The main way to score is by chaining jumps with stunt combos. Moving your fish is similar to flying a plane in a sim, as you glide down and around to pick up speed, boost at the right moment and break the water into the air. From there, your analogue sticks will turn and flip your fish around like a possession as bold EA BIG style graphics burst onto the screen and the Y2K beats blast around you. Doing so will earn you points, but you only keep them if you land properly. Much like a diving sim, you need to land close to face first. Do it well and you’ll get a perfect or good rating to score big points. Land the tailfin first, and you’ll score limited points. Belly flop and you’ll lose points overall. This means that whilst Tuna Hake is madcap, over-the-top, silly, and extremely sensitive to your control inputs with tricks, you’ll still need to stay grounded if you want to score decent points. Scoring decent points unlocks more fish types. You’ll also be able to unlock some fish by collecting most of the 30 collectables across the game, too.
I’ve had a blast so far with the game. It is a wildly stupid affair, and its extreme budget price tag made me blind buy it and I have zero regrets. I have a couple of minor gripes, and they largely involve the graphics filters. There is an early PS2 fuzzy smear across the graphics. It is a stylistic choice that takes you back to 2001 in a great way, but when you are deep underwater, sometimes that blurs out too much of the world around you, and it all becomes a dark or light blue blur. I’d love some control over that, and also better control of rail grinding. The island and pool areas have rails you can, in theory, grind on. I’ve not been able to do it at all, and there is no help to suggest what I’m doing wrong. If I could land those, my chains would boost my speed, and I’d be laughing all the way to the fishing net.
Silly, irreverent, chaotic, yet requiring some player skill to get the best out of it, Tuna Hake’s Underwater splashes joy and humour onto the screen. I’d love to see an expanded sequel with more varied level layouts and designs to consider because I genuinely think this has the potential to be a great series. They did pro surfing, didn’t they? This is the more authentic version!
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