In early April, Windrose released and was an absolute success with over 1.5 million copies sold quickly, within less than a month. The pirate themed RPG has you explore islands, calm waters and much more treacherous locales, to finish dangerous quests and gather loot.
Your first steps as a pirate are in Windroses‘ tutorial; learn to fight, get sunk, wake up and then you’re off to the races. With a fairly in-depth first few quests teaching you about adventuring on land, they’ll take you through finding a crew and boat — both are vital to getting your sea legs prepped for the voyages ahead.
Here you’re tasked with taking out Blackbeard and his (incredibly well stocked) army of ships and men as you also follow the instructions of the mysterious Doctor Galen, who mentions a magical artifact that he joined the original crew to find. You’ll have to venture from island to island, faction to faction and build up relations to survive and thrive in this massive open world.
With mechanics not too dissimilar to Valheim, you can build a base relatively quickly as you gather resources and materials to upgrade equipment and your ship. The building mechanics themselves are also incredibly familiar, with snap-building to make them look symmetrical and clean, angled roofs, different sized walls and pillars… there’s a surprising amount of customisation on land rather than sea.
Speaking of sea customisation, Windroses’ ships can all be vastly chopped and changed to meet your needs. Do you value firepower above all else? Then go for the Blackbeard variant of the Ketch ship with customised guns for armour piercing capabilities. Fancy a go at transporting ships? Then there’s options for bigger storage and healthier hulls so, honestly anything is viable.
Your character isn’t left out with all of these options either, swords, guns, axes and much more can be equipped and upgraded on your journey. This also comes with a fairly simple skill tree that lets you choose what to focus on in terms of getting better stats, healing or just outright damage for a certain class of weapon. You can tweak each of these items and skills throughout the various stations and menus available letting you fine-tune your experience perfectly.
Naval combat is basically what everyone wanted back in the days of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, simple cannon combat aiming left/right and forward, giving you a great field of view on other ships and letting you tactically maneuver to slam enemy ships with all your cannons in a kind of ocean ballet. This becomes even more deadly when you play with friends, as your small armada decimates enemies in larger groups as you all get your own ship.
You can also choose what type of cannon ball to load into the cannons aiming either for the hulls with normal balls or the masts with chain shot letting you disable faster moving ships. You can also use a vast array of items to buff yourself and your crew or repair a damaged ship both in and out of combat. Finally you can also board enemy vessels to finish the job one on one while the battle rages around you, eliminate the enemy crew, sink the ship and take the spoils.
Windrose really encompasses the spirit of being a pirate, it lets you basically do what you want and explore at your own pace with or without friends. It may seem like a simple concept to just go out and explore but honestly it’s incredibly fun and has surprising depth to the mechanics.
One of the few critiques I do have about Windrose is the incredible amount of resources it takes to actually do some of the progression. My starting island looks like a flattened industrial site at the minute as resources do not seem to regeneratecome back, forcing you to venture further and further to find crucial wood and metals. This can be problematic if you don’t know where to go on the massive map but and is slightly alleviated by the fast travel bells, letting you teleport to places on your ship.
I think my favourite moment so far has got to be chasing down some of Blackbeard’s haulers with a friend, the enemies were slightly higher level than us and outnumbered us two to one. It was an incredibly gritty fight but the satisfaction of coming out on top, scraping through was amazing and hasn’t stopped being enjoyable since I started playing.
Overall, Windrose has been a wild ride filled with adventure, challenging enemies and a lot of fun. There’s very few things I would say could improve it but with so much potential for growth I’m genuinely looking forward to what the future brings and what new lands will be ripe for plundering in the future.
If you would like to unleash your inner pirate and set sails on the open sea, then you can find Windrose on Steam.
