Windrose Early Access Review

You ever had one of those days when Blackbeard boards your ship, shoots you, 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 there's enough depth and polish here already to match a lot of full games, even with an unfinished story and some rough edges.

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. The building system is pretty flexible – my earliest shelters looked very Robinson Crusoe-chic, but I eventually unlocked the parts needed to get a nice Caribbean hacienda going. Decorations even extend the duration of your rested buff, giving you a mechanical reward for taking the time to spruce things up.

From chopping down trees to mining ore, there are a lot of familiar survival game chores to do. But for the most part, I found Windrose to be pretty respectful of my time. If I had to do something repetitive and tedious, I usually didn't need to spend so much time on it that I lost all interest.

You start out in a lush, coastal jungle where the biggest threats are wild boars and your main goal is to get your first ship built so you can get back out on the tides. Moving into the mid-level highlands, human enemies with sabers and guns as well as predators like wolves become more common, and points of interest can feature mini dungeons with clever and challenging puzzles. At the end of the current Early Access journey, you venture into the deadly cursed swamps, where spending too much time in certain areas can cause madness and instant death.

The escalation of mechanical challenges and supernatural elements – oh yeah, Blackbeard is up to some kind of necromancy, by the way – meant the loop of arriving in a new area and working toward the next upgrade tier didn't get too repetitive. With even more biomes planned for the full release, I'm curious to see just how supernatural we can go. The swamps are already pretty wild!

Ground combat is probably my favorite part of Windrose Whether you’re facing off against wildlife or the restless dead, ground combat is probably my favorite part of Windrose. The devs describe it 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.

The end chapter bosses are brutally tough, too. Even with fully upgraded gear, I definitely got some of that Souls feeling in these hectic but satisfying encounters. My one complaint here ties back to how stats are so heavily based on consumables – as a result, dying to the same boss several times while you're learning the fight can require you to leave and go grind for resources if you don't want to face them in a greatly diminished state. And that can get tedious.

There are also some edge cases where the enemy AI causes everything to fall apart. Melee foes have a tendency to completely mob you and shove you into a corner while you get wombo comboed to death from fifty different directions. This can normally be avoided by simply running away and using terrain intelligently. But the two most miserable missions in the entirety of Windrose were these ones that required me to board a pirate ship and fight like a dozen zombies in very close quarters. You can't even stand on the deck of your own ship and shoot at them because they're scripted to respawn if you're not on their vessel. I eventually had to cheese the whole thing by getting them stuck on a railing. This is simply terrible encounter design. But at least stumbles like that are rare.

In comparison to the ground combat, which is generally strong but has some rough patches, naval engagements flip the script by being somewhat unremarkable with occasional moments of greatness. Cannons fire on realistic trajectories that require you to lead targets, so there is a high skill ceiling here. But overall it feels kind of arcadey. There's no mechanic for wind direction, for instance, which I thought was especially odd, and you never have to replenish ammunition or hire more crewmates, either. Co-op partners are better off on their own ships since there's not much they can do on yours that you couldn't do solo, which isn't my preference. Boarding action s can be a great time, though, since your crewmates will help you out in those, preventing the problem of getting mobbed by too many enemies in a tight space.

The wave modeling is dramatic, with large swells making even the current largest pilotable frigates seem small while also providing cover from enemy cannons. But storms at sea can feel a little underwhelming. I don't think it's possible to capsize even in the freebie rowboat, for instance. I also have some small nitpicks about stuff like the way waves hit the shoreline. They seem to spawn a fixed distance away and arrive all at the same time, which doesn't look especially realistic. I do like the stylized realism of Windrose's world all in all, but it can seem a bit gloomy and Baltic out on the open water, with constant clouds and navy blue seas, for a game set in the sun-drenched Caribbean.

I really enjoyed the music and sound design, though. And yes, there are plenty of sea shanties to enjoy on long voyages across the gigantic map recorded by a full chorus – both familiar favorites and more obscure tunes. The sound of waves against the hull or seabirds circling sell the world in a very rich way. I'll just never get tired of cruising the Spanish Main while some crusty old sea dog from Liverpool belts out a melodramatic lament with the lads to a prostitute he's convinced he fell in love with before she was cruelly taken from him. That's what the good life is all about, you know?

As far as character progression, Windrose feels a bit stingy at the moment. That’s especially true of talent points, as I didn't feel like I got that many to play with – which is a shame, because they unlock neat playstyle enhancements like faster reloads or more health recovery from quickly landing counterattacks, à la Bloodborne. But I'm also unsure how much bigger Windrose is supposed to get. Experience points exclusively come from completing quests and exploring points of interest, and there are only so many of those, which means the current level cap is somewhere around 15. Maybe with the full release, it won't seem so restrictive.