You ever had one of those days when Blackbeard boards your ship, shoots you and leaves you for dead, and you wash up penniless and alone on some uninhabited island having only survived due to mysterious, dark magic? Who hasn’t, right? Windrose, a piratical survival crafter that just launched into Early Access, uses that universal experience as a starting point for some in-depth exploration and swashbuckling during a mythical reimagining of the Golden Age of Piracy. And around 30 hours in, I’m having a rousing little time with it.
Windrose takes after Valheim in a handful of ways, including the fact that you don’t actually need to eat or sleep in order to survive. Rather, food provides stat buffs without which you can easily get one-shot by any wandering wild pig. So it’s important, but you’re not going to starve to death because you went AFK for a little while. Scrounging up bananas and coconuts, I got to work on my first shelter, and the building system is pretty flexible – though everything looks very Robinson Crusoe-chic early on.
Chopping down trees and gathering plant fiber is a familiar affair. Once I worked my way up to mining, though, things slowed down a little. Ores like copper and iron can generally only be found in instanced caves, and a lot of those are mostly empty. No enemies, no treasure – just rocks to hit. That can get a little bit monotonous. But overall, Windrose has been fairly respectful of my time in terms of the amount of resources it expects me to collect to progress. So some tasks may be tedious, but I’m not forced to spend ages doing them.
Where things get fun and interesting are at the combat-focused points of interest around the map, which so far have been fairly straightforward: up to four chests full of valuable and rare items guarded by wildlife, enemy pirates, or sometimes the creepy undead. Yeah, Blackbeard is up to some kind of necromancy, by the way. I’m not sure exactly how yet. But we’ll get to the bottom of it.
The devs describe the combat as “soulslite,” which is a label I’m a bit hesitant to use as a big soulsborne fan myself, but it is quite responsive and kinetic. Parrying opponents at just the right time removes shield icons from their health bar, which can eventually stun them and let you really go to town. Pistols are quite powerful, but take a long time to reload. And weapons like sabers, rapiers, and chunky two-handers feel very different to fight with, including their unique special moves. Ground combat may be my favorite part of Windrose so far.
In comparison, the ship battles are currently unremarkable. I’ve only acquired the first vessel, the scrappy ketch, but it all feels a little bit arcadey for my tastes. I love the wave modeling, and the way big swells can make even the largest vessels look small. But there’s currently no mechanic for wind direction. Steering can be kind of awkward since the UI doesn’t tell you how far you’ve turned the rudder. And while firing cannons is heavily skill-based with detailed trajectory modeling, it’s just not as satisfying as fighting with a sword and a boomstick yet. Of course, damaged ships can be boarded for extra loot, combining the best of both systems.
The map is absolutely gigantic, too, which is great. Even since getting my first proper ship and exploring for another 20 hours, I don’t think I’ve even seen fully 5% of it. I haven’t even been to the main hub or Tortuga. Islands are divided into biomes of increasing difficulty – again, much like Valheim – and I’ve made it to the boss of the first area. But he is an absolute monster with the gear I have right now, so I decided to explore to earn better gear and more stat points before taking him on again.
There is a limited system of point-to-point fast travel, which I’m a little bit conflicted about, as I would rather just sail from place to place. I think fast travel can be a bit self-defeating in these kinds of games since it makes the world feel smaller. There are already some server settings that allow for a more immersive experience, like turning off map markers for points of interest. And of course, I can simply not click the fast travel button, but that’s something I’d maybe like to be able to turn off entirely in the future.
The biomes look really slick, too. They’ve gone for a kind of stylized realism that hits a sweet spot between ultra fidelity and more of a sylized feel that is overall really effective. As someone who has lived by the ocean, I have small gripes here and there. Waves near the shore seem to spawn a fixed distance from the shoreline and arrive on the sand all at the same time no matter where you’re standing which is… not how waves work. But it’s Early Access still.
So far, Windrose has made a strong first impression. Especially with its skill-focused pistol-and-blade ground combat and dastardly difficult bosses, I’m hooked by its exploration and progression. I’ll be updating this review as I discover new things, with a final verdict to come once I’ve seen all this Early Access release has to offer.
