Sometimes you will unearth a diamond in the rough and find absolute joy in that discovery. For me this happens to be Windrose, a high seas pirate adventure that has been a blast to play. From land to sea there is a ton to explore in this adventure, and loads to do. So, let’s fire off the cannons, and set sail ye’ landlubbers.
Your adventure starts in one hell of a fashion, as your ship gets boarded by Blackbeard's henchmen. Yes, that Blackbeard. After a small battle, you find yourself shot through the back, and your ship burned at sea, but as in the case of most videogames that have this dire type of opener, you miraculously live. Before the shot, you find a strange artefact that for some reason has kept you alive.
When you finally awake from this near death experience, you find yourself on a deserted archipelago in which your story of survival begins. Devoid of your previous riches, you only have an worn out sabre, a pistol, and a couple of rounds and some gunpowder. From here it is on you to figure out how to survive and to get revenge on the ones who had shot you.
The main way you progress throughout the game is by collecting the various items you find around the islands. This comes from collecting basic resources, such as wood, to aid in crafting and the general need of survival as while you won’t have babysit a series of meters, you do have to watch your hunger, but that also serves as a way to earn buffs as you enjoy a good meal.
Each time you pick up a new item you’ll gain recipes that will help you along your way. You can even explore abandoned ruins and pirate camps to find additional recipes for helping to build up your camp. Survival games have often had you benefit from those types of recipes as you would have to constantly re-craft your basic tools and weapons due to durability. Windrose gets around that by removing durability, but having tiers of tools that are needed for the harvesting of higher quality materials. It works, and removes the sometimes annoying components to most survival games.
Crafting and of course, placing those objects around your camp is very intuitive, and gives your a good sense of positioning to the whole ordeal. Often, most survival games feel clicky and limiting in the placement of those objects, but Windrose feels good and gives you a better handle on placing down those items.
To deal with the numerous enemies that get in your way, you’ll need to learn the game’s combat system, which I find very fun. Learning which attacks to dodge and which to parry are crucial if you want to survive. There are also some pieces of gear that require you to learn how to do these things in order to get the most benefit out of them.
The combat in Windrose feels right on par, not too difficult but still difficult enough to give you a challenge. You have to watch your stamina closely as it is the only way to keep your attacks going, or be able to dodge. Making sure you are able to block attacks is also crucial so watching your shields as you block is important, or you will leave yourself open to attacks.
Also helping combat, you are able to get skills and increase your stats by levelling up. However, unlike most games where you can just kill enemies and grind, there are only two ways you can get experience in this one and that is by completing quests or exploring locations so get out there and explore the seven seas and find all the loot you can.
After a bit of quest progression, you will find yourself being able to finally build your own ship, and this brings me to my favourite part of Windrose; sea combat and sailing. Fighting and boarding the enemy ships has to be my favourite parts of Windrose and it really makes me feel like a pirate. And the sea shanty that your crew sings while sailing the seven seas is the icing on this pirate cake.
As you will find that each area has one major threat: a boss that you have to kill. Gearing up well is crucial as these fights are pretty damn hard, but they are so rewarding when you win. Once you have defeated the boss, you unlock the next region and resources to help you progress and become a stronger pirate. Allowing you to take on the new threats in each area with new gear and ships. LIttle by little, you’ll find yourself back to the pirate you once were.
To help you travel along, Windrose has given you the ability to build your own fast travel network as well. Some people find that these kill a lot of the feel of the games since you were no longer sailing from Island to Island. To me it doesn’t hurt to have these, as it allows me to get to the resource dense areas that I need to get to constantly, and saves me the 10 to 20 minute travel from island to island.
But I still completely understand why people love to sail in Windrose. The sounds and visuals of this game are beautiful and I love looking at them all the time. Sailing the seas feels so realistic that it does almost feel like a crime to use the fast travels. Still, they are there should you need them.
All in all, Windrose is a blast of a time. I encourage anyone who loves to even dabble in the pirate genre to experience it. And with the co-op nature of the title, grab a few more crew members to join ya. The more crew the merrier, and working together is always more fun than playing solo. With how powerful one ship can be on the sea, what happens when you have a whole fleet.
Blackbeard better watch out.