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

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.

Sirocco, which launched into early access on Steam last Friday, is an evolution of the mod with sleeker visuals and finer controls. The core is very much the same, and the game bills itself as a MOBA where players can “ditch the roles, hard counters and last hits.”

Though I encountered some performance hitches while trying it out, Sirocco’s emphasis on chaotic teamfights and hails of bullets was fun in a matter of moments.

Because weapons fire themselves, positioning is even more important than in Dota 2 or League of Legends; long-range cannons will start whittling you down the moment you’re in range, and short-range guns tend to have explosive effects to make up for the inherent risk. The Death Bomb, for instance, does increasingly ludicrous damage the lower your health is.

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.

I never played the original Battleships mod, but I’ve had a fair bit of fun with Sirocco. Frankly, I’m always happy to see player-made addons grow up into standalone games, MOBA or otherwise.

Sirocco is available to download for free on Steam.