Windrose Preview
Being a pirate looks incredibly rad. I mean, modern media certainly paints a compelling picture of the pirate life. But surely a lot of it was hard labour and serious struggle. Windrose is a pirate survival sim that includes all the gritty details. After spending several hours in those waterlogged boots, I’m not so sure I could survive the pirate’s life after all. On the other hand, this game is already enormous, and we’re still deep in early access territory.
You (and several friends, if you’re into that kind of thing) start your journey on a deserted island full of raw materials and deadly creatures. From there, you’ve got to whip up a crew, a ship, and some kind of armory. It’s a fascinating premise that lends extra urgency to the standard survival mechanics. You can’t just languish on this stretch of land; you’ve got a whole ocean to explore.
Starting a new game means tweaking a laundry list of detailed settings. You can change enemy strength, their behaviour, and more. So the game is exactly as hard or easy as you want it to be. After getting into a few fights, I definitely wanted it to be easier. Combat is a simple mix of dodges, blocks, and strikes. But you’re extremely squishy, at least at first.
Boar’d To Death
By that, I mean you get murdered after two hits from any given enemy. Plus, you don’t get experience from combat, only from completing quests. So how do you advance? With food and supplies, of course! Different meals expand your health bar, new armor boosts your defense, and better weapons strengthen your attacks.
This all led to me being locked in a loop of sorts. I was constantly scooping up new materials, building new structures, and getting murdered by random enemies. As an aside, grabbing items off the ground was weirdly difficult at times, with the required button needing intense and repeated inputs. All of the other controls were fine? It was exclusively grabbing materials that needed special attention.
Death Can’t Slow Me Down
Somehow, this loop wasn’t frustrating, mostly because death came with few consequences. You drop an item cache, you go back to get it, you move on. Repeated deaths just create more caches. There isn’t any armor degradation that I noticed, and enemy health doesn’t reset. To be fair, there are almost certainly settings you can tweak that change this.
I’m a little confused by the pace set in Windrose. There’s exciting ship combat, careful exploration, and grinding survival sections. These three concepts feel like they’ve been stapled together from totally separate games. Depending on what you’re most excited to do, you might be waiting several hours for this game to get good. I got sucked into the survival bits for sure. But the ship combat, my main draw, was just many hours away. It felt like I was playing one game and hoping it would transform into another one in between sessions.
Pirate Ship Please
Although Windrose is in early access, I got a pretty good picture of what the final product will be like. The sailing mechanics are simple and intuitive. Combat feels well-crafted, the tech trees are nicely laid out, and progression feels nice and natural. Certain inputs are weirdly slippery, and the pacing could use some work. But all in all, the game shows promise. The full release could be excellent, but even the early access edition is worth a look. Just be prepared to do a lot of labour before your pirate dreams come true.
***A Steam key was provided by the publisher***
