Windrose Early Access First Impressions – The Best Survival Crafting Pirate Game Yet
It'll shiver yer timbers!
As someone who has incessantly played survival-crafting games since the pandemic, I’ve become a fan of Windrose after the first 10 hours. Not that it takes that long to get hooked, but my standard for survival-crafting games is high because of games like Valheim, V Rising, Grounded 2, and Enshrouded.
It is almost a guarantee that a fan of the survival-crafting genre will enjoy Windrose, but how good is it really? The setting revolves around the Age of Piracy, where you explore a vast open world through the seas.
You’ll fight on both land and sea, either with friends or solo (with your NPC crew). The game also features soulslike combat, fighting unique bosses, boarding enemy ships, and plundering treasures – living the life of a badass pirate. But let’s dive deeper into why Windrose is great even in its early access stage.
Windrose Nails Down the Core Foundation of Survival-Crafting Mechanics While Looking and Feeling Extremely Polished
What caught me by surprise is how polished Windrose feels. It’s an early-access game, and most survival-crafting games feel limiting, rough around the edges, or just plain unfinished in this stage.
The movement is smooth, the building mechanics are easy to learn, and they offer a lot of creative freedom. The combat system, mirroring Souls-like mechanics, is smooth and engaging at first but lacks depth (ship combat probably compensates for this). More on this later.
The essence of being a pirate is immediately felt: plundering treasure, exploring islands, and getting your own ship and crew. The UI is easy to navigate through without any unnecessary visual clutter. Most of the core features that have all the makings of a good survival-crafting game are there. While there are still a few features missing, such as the ability to delete items or set a waypoint to navigate more easily, Windrose has a solid foundation with its vision in mind, not to mention it has shockingly good music, too.
Windrose’s Depth is Great, But The Early Access Shows
While Windrose definitely has a lot of depth for its early access launch version, the standard for survival-crafting games is rising. It is easy to spot aspects where they could’ve done way more if you have played a lot of other different games.
First, the talent system feels a bit too slow. Talents are divided into four main categories: general and mobility tree, one-handed weapons, two-handed weapons, and ranged weapons. All talent points reflect the role of the category they are in, but lack variety. A lot of talents just raise the damage or set conditions to raise more damage. There are some unique talents at the end of each tree, which can be fun to experiment with.
You can eventually combine talents from multiple talent trees, like mixing Evasive Fencer (one-handed weapon tree), Marathon Runner (mobility tree), and ranged weapons bonuses. In this example, you get more passive reload speed through perfect dashes from Evasive Fencer. Marathon Runner gives you more stamina, allowing you to dash more. You passively reload your weapon just by dodging, which gives you more opportunities to shoot, making damage bonuses from the ranged tree more effective.
But completing a setup like this isn’t feasible until very late into the game because some of the unique talents, like Evasive Fencer, require six points in that group to take. Most builds will be a mix of two or three categories, but it won’t make a massive difference when playing the role. By the time you get enough talent points, you might have finished most of the content already.
It definitely has some potential, so this area will feel a little bit awkward until there’s more content. It is worth noting that experimenting with these talents and finding some unique armor sets and weapons that synergize well together is still fun and adds more depth to the gearing system, especially since there’s also stat progressions and food buffs.
But, with all this said, there’s also naval combat. There are different ships, and once you unlock your first big ship, the Ketch, you’ll start to experience battle on the seas. The seas are littered with pirates, and Windrose does its naval combat pretty well. The mechanics of sailing a ship and fighting are simple and addictive, especially in multiplayer.
Ships can be customized aesthetically and equipped with cannons, hull plating, and crew weapons. Naval combat is uniquely done where your ship can fire from three angles (the front and each side). You’ll have to completely destroy the ship first before boarding to plunder it. Ship battles are engaging and require careful navigation, which I would say is the game’s main selling point.
Apart from combat, I’d have to tip my hat off to all the quality of life features already available in the game. The ease of building, shipping, and character inventory management, free talent and stat resets, crafted fast travel features, large item stacks for specific items, crafting mechanics, magic storages (able to use materials from storage for crafting), and the instant calling for ships make the game feel so complete already.
Windrose is definitely one of the best survival-crafting games I have played on early access launch, and is a must-try for fans of the genre, even for those just wanting to play a co-op game with a bunch of friends.
