You’re playing Windrose. You stumble through the green hell that is the West Indies at night, chopping away at foliage with your rusty cutlass. Suddenly, from the shadows behind you, you hear a groan. Raising your lamp, you see the source: a rotting, bloated, waterlogged corpse of an unfortunate soul that washed up on the same beach you did. This corpse has been here for decades, shambling forward and tearing away at flesh with its rotten teeth as it feeds an insatiable hunger. A ravenous desire for flesh that can never be quelled has driven this ghoul to set its sights upon you.
You sigh in relief, knowing now that the source of the sound was not a boar.
Windrose, for many gamers at this point, almost needs no introduction. This pirate-survival-crafting adventure title gained massive hype even before the hugely popular release of the game’s playable demo, wowing players with the promise of a truly open-world experience where you can not only build your own base but also your own ships, and engage in both hand-to-hand combat and ship-to-ship naval warfare in a fantastical pirate adventure the likes of which we have not seen since Pirates of the Caribbean Online.
Getting my hands on the game a few days early, I quickly found the title taking over my life, pushing back other deadlines as I kept finding myself investing “just a few more” hours into Windrose. While I certainly feel like I have brushed up against the limits of what the current Early Access build of Windrose has to offer, and I definitely have my constructive feedback, I overall had a great time with the game, and I am super excited to see what comes of it as it continues development.
For the utterly unfamiliar, or those who just need a recap, Windrose is a pirate-themed crafting-survival game with Souls-like combat and a focus on naval exploration and warfare. It is purely a PvE experience, tasking you and your friends with surviving after being shipwrecked and marooned by the dread pirate Blackbeard, crafting shelters using resources you find as you sail between the islands of the West Indies.
Right off the bat, I really love the crafting and building mechanics in Windrose. Bases can be built around bonfires, which allow you to construct shelters and crafting stations on multiple islands as your needs expand. There is a lot of freedom provided in the buildable structures, which also look pretty great. Some further improvements could be made in this area, such as adding more non-square pieces or the ability to replace walls with doors or windows. I think the game Conan Exiles would be a great place for the developers to look for inspiration for the base building, as it has some of my favorite mechanics and options in the genre, and the two games play fairly similarly to each other.
As far as balance in the resource gathering and crafting go, I am certain there are areas in which Windrose could improve, but the most noticeable issue comes from the acquisition of hides, a highly used resource that requires you to hunt boars; this is an issue I will get into a bit more as I cover combat.
Basic gear is acquired through crafting, but most of the gear you are going to want to use comes from unique sets you find in the wild, usually in chests that you find around the crew and hideouts of Blackbeard. While you can still upgrade this gear at your workbenches and craft copies of any gear you find once you discover it, I found that making the only truly viable loot come from world drops kind of lowers the value of these crafting stations.
While the crafting elements in Windrose are certainly fun, I would argue that the game leans into the MMO and adventure-game loop much harder than its crafting mechanics, which in turn can make the survival-craft side of the game feel a little underdeveloped or less worth your time, especially after the very early game.
Windrose features self-proclaimed Soulslike combat. These are combat mechanics inspired by the Dark Souls games, without being a direct copy of every mechanic. The combat is notably very high damage, reaction based, and requires real attention and timing to successfully survive.
My issue with the combat does not come from how difficult it is, but rather how the difficulty clashes with the game’s progression system.
Progression is tied to two areas: gear level and character leveling, with the former coming from upgrading your crafted or discovered gear and the latter coming from gathering experience points. Levels follow a more traditional attribute-improvement system that allows you to customize the build of your character as you see fit. The issue is that the former is locked behind region-based materials, which are in regions you cannot really explore until defeating the boss of the prior one, and the latter only rewards experience points for exploration and completing missions.
This essentially means that there is a cap on how strong you can become in an area, and you do not actually see tangible rewards from defeating enemies like you would in a Souls game with, well, souls. This makes combat feel like a chore, since enemies will almost always be stronger than you even if you have invested a lot of time into combat. It does not feel great when a simple task like gathering hides becomes a deadly game, because a character with all of the best gear for a region and multiple levels of invested points can still get killed in two hits by a boar. Enemies will consistently hit harder than you and have significantly more health than you, and fighting many of them does not meaningfully change that.
Lastly, the game’s sea combat is great, clearly inspired by the Ubisoft ship mechanics created for Assassin’s Creed Black Flag and made the norm for the pirate game genre. Water feels real, like rolling mountains that your boat must cut through, and sailing is a beautiful and rewarding experience, especially with the addition of flotsam you can use in your base building. I was disappointed that there was no ramming damage, and I hope to see that in a future update.
To be completely honest, I have a lot to say about Windrose; much more than I have the time or word count to cover in this review. To leave you with a summary of my opinion, I would say that the game is great. The combat is punishing, and while it does reward skill and reaction time, it can feel very enemy-sided, and the progression system is not designed in a way that really meshes well with how the game is played. The crafting and building are fun, but more can be added to expand on them, and certain recipes can feel like a chore to gather for. The sailing is amazing, the plot and world are great, and the game is absolutely beautiful, especially on the open sea.
I highly recommend Windrose, even with my criticisms, and I look forward to seeing where the game goes as development continues.
Pros:
- Excellent mesh of a pirate, sea-faring adventure game and survival crafting
- Fun building mechanics with great quality of life features
- Beautiful graphics and incredible sailing simulation
- An excellent world, best enjoyed with friends
Cons:
- Difficult, Soulslike combat that clashes a bit with how the game chooses to handle progression
- Some imbalanced crafting recipes and gathering
- Overall unfinished, but still with a lot to offer in Early Access
TryHardGuides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of Windrose. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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