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I was already interested in Everwind, an upcoming sandbox RPG heavily styled after Minecraft but with first-person combat that can't help but bring The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim to mind, after seeing its trailer and successful Kickstarter pitch. When the demo started flying up the Steam Next Fest charts, I grew more curious. Everything clicked when I realized that the publisher of this thing is Bohemia Interactive, best known as the maker of DayZ and Arma 3 among other sandbox icons (the much less iconic Ylands is probably the closest parallel here). Thoroughly intrigued, I had a run of the demo, and I'll be damned, I think we've got something here.
Everwind, by developer Enjoy Studio S.A., s a co-op-equipped adventure about gathering resources, crafting gear, and exploring scattered islands across the air and sea using your upgradeable airship base. It is extremely Minecraft-flavored from the get-to. Break and place blocks, craft tools like axes and pickaxes, repair your gear, slap on some armor, and chow down on some mushroom soup. Here's a radical change of pace for survival game openers: punch skeletons, not trees. And by punch, I mean wildly swing a lead pipe in their general direction.
The combat is probably the weakest point right now, at least as the default warrior class. (I've read multiplayer is iffy, but haven't tested it myself.) We'll get mages and engineers at some point, it seems, but good old-fashioned melee is all the demo has to offer, and it's a bit of a slap fight. You can time your swings with dodges, block incoming attacks, and shield bash enemies for an opening, but I'd like to see some more rhyme and reason to enemy behavior. Melee in Minecraft is all about knocking enemies back, whereas Skyrim brings much more engrossing pacing to duels. Everwind feels stuck in the middle, with arcade fun and more serious complexity eating each other instead of synergizing. =
As someone who has historically enjoyed Minecraft but never truly stuck with it, this demo is doing a few things that I really like. I'm a sucker for floating islands thanks to JRPG psyops, and upgrading your airship's size, speed, and maximum altitude gives you a clear goal to pursue that has a measurable impact on the world. Piloting that airship feels good, too; I carefully set my vessel down for a soft seaside landing after spotting a watchtower on an otherwise abandoned island, and hastily constructed a dirt bridge to shore.
I can easily imagine hunting for specific resources to beef up my engine, and inevitably getting sidetracked by dungeons and caves – always my favorite parts of Minecraft – on the way. The opening barrage of items and recipes is a bit much, with the demo tutorial simultaneously feeling too short and overloaded, but most everything felt the way I wanted it to. Opening chests, crafting tools, eating food, chopping wood – I just relied on my Minecraft instincts, and they did not betray me. I did totally lose track of time during my session with Everwind, which is a very good sign.
This is one of those ideas with a sky-high ceiling for potential but also a cavernous floor. But so far, Everwind actually shows a lot of promise. In my mind, I can see it becoming a legitimately good game, which is a start. The demo alone has nearly 1,000 very positive reviews on Steam already, which is a downright great start.
