Hooded Horse’s new strategy game Rogue Carrier has you captaining a research ship on a planet where the seas boil with violent squid

Is that Hostile Waters I see on the horizon?

There are two cultural artifacts that buzz about my brain without ever truly settling: 2001's action game RTS hybrid Hostile Waters and Wes Anderson's film The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. It may be an unfair lens to apply to newly announced roguelite colony builder Rogue Carrier, but it has enough of both of them to have me ready to dive into its ocean.

In Rogue Carrier, you are the captain of a science ship that is stranded on a strange world. More than a schooner, this vessel is a mega carrier – the largest vessel humanity's ever built. The Bohemoth is able to support whole buildings and production lines on its back. It falls to you to pilot the ship across an ocean that is bubbling with alien sea life – some of it friendly, much of it not – surviving attacks, learning more about the world, and finding your way off the planet.

Rogue Carrier looks to be a lovely mashup of familiar genres and mechanics.

Image credit: Hooded Horse / Wild Fields

From the trailer, it looks like you can control The Behemoth directly in third-person, plot out waypoints between islands from a drawn back map view, and also take over individual control of some of the planes and other vehicles stored in the carrier's bowels. Then there's the Tetris-like placement of factory buildings on The Behemoth's deck. With buildings unlocking different kinds of resource harvesting and production lines, but limits on deck space forcing you to specialise. And there's even a little bit that shows off combat which has a touch of the autobattler about it, with aggressive sea animals getting shot to pieces by the turrets lining the science vessels bows. Oh, and, being a roguelite, there are the oft-used event cards. These give you options of how to respond to a crisis, inevitably costing you vital resources, pissing off a portion of your crew, or some other negative eventuality.

There is a lot on show in Carrier Command that we have seen in one form or another in the past. However, I cannot stress how easy it is to convince me to write about something if it looks even a smidge like Hostile Waters at a distance.

Rage Software's game was a marvelous fusion of RTS and third-person action. You controlled the carrier/factory where you built units for battle, acted as armchair general by directing them on a map screen, and you could hop into the cockpit of any unit to take part in the battles itself. It's criminal that it remains a game that had so few imitators. (Though, shout out to Bohemia for reviving the Carrier Command license Hostile Waters was inspired by – even if the resulting game was capable but a tad dull – and Microprose for its dedicated but impenetrable Carrier Command 2.)

Rogue Carrier looks to have something of that spirit. You hop between different perspectives on the action and you are, after all, the captain of a big ol' ship. Time will tell if it stokes the same passionate fires. After all, in the years since falling in love with Hostile Waters, I've become besotted with factory production lines, so perhaps this is a game purpose built for me.

I should probably give equal words to The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, but the trailer does a far better job of showing why you, too, should want more of a world where rival oceanographers biologists sail about the ocean sometimes collaborating, often bickering, always on the raggedy edge of their ships falling apart. Also, it has Bill Murray.