Anyone buying Windrose in the hopes of a fast-paced pirate adventure will be in for a nasty shock. You'd probably get to be a pirate captain faster if you started learning to sail in real life. Windrose wants to be a survival game, complete with hunger mechanics, base-building, and endless resource-mining. But it also wants to be a supernatural pirate fantasy adventure and those two genres don't always gel.
The game starts with Blackbeard's minions ransacking your ship and shooting you fatally in the chest. Game over? Nope, because you were luckily carrying some mystical doo-dad that saves your life. You wake up mysteriously unharmed on a desert island, armed with your sword and pistol with a lone bullet left.
High seas survival
Now stop me if you've heard this one before. You collect wood and plant fibre to build a shelter, a campfire, and a workbench. From there you cook meals to keep your hunger down and upgrade your weapons so you can take out the deadly (but succulent!) wildlife on the island. You find a cave and celebrate by rapid-clicking 'mine copper ore' until the game owes you a new mouse.
This is all perfectly solid and functional and other words you'll find in 'Damning with Faint Praise for Dummies'. It's all too familiar, frankly, and lacks a unique visual identity or enough new ideas to reach the heights of a Grounded 2 or Subnautica.
Things improve when night falls and Windrose starts showing off its supernatural side. Watery zombies start appearing on the shores, known as the 'Drowned' (uh oh, let's hope Minecraft's lawyers don't accuse this of the other kind of piracy). Giant crabs are also determined to ruin your nice day at the beach. Arrr, now we be talkin' – more magical nonsense please!
Swordplay is fine if unspectacular, clearly designed for one-on-one duels. I know this because the game keeps surrounding me with multiple enemies and then sending me swiftly to the grave. Timed blocks are the trick here, as is knowing when to risk some slashes or when to run away like a coward. As for your gun, it can go drown, frankly. It's loud, takes about fifty years to reload, and barely does any damage. How on Earth did the dodo go instinct when I can barely scratch them with this?
It's not all crap guns and dopey birds on the island. I found a corpse with a note talking of buried treasure and naturally had to track it down. I dug up the chest, threw it open, and was greeted by four drowned spawning out of nowhere. Apparently they were the ones who the treasure-burier betrayed. Eep.
I also chanced upon some ruins, which contained an incredible treasure. A ring that granted +6% of a certain kind of damage when worn! …What. This is the kind of rubbish non-reward that has helped turn the tide strongly against live service games, and it's disappointing to see it here.
Eventually the ship's doctor, who also apparently miraculously survived, was waiting for me at my camp. He informs me that several of my crew are being held captive on nearby islands. I now also have access to a tiny boat to reach them with. The good doctor also tells me to look out for shipwrecks on the coastlines. If I find one that can be repaired, I'll finally have my own pirate ship. Hoorah!
Until then, I'll have to make do with this tiny one-man boat which could be outpaced by a snail. It crawls across the sea at a glacial pace, as if someone on the dev team played The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and thought "if only the sailing was more dull." There's essentially nothing to do but admire the admittedly very pretty water and wonder if you should reinstall Assassin's Creed: Black Flag.
Dodo danger
Things liven up considerably when one of Blackbeard's many ships spots me. They're patrolling the waters in nasty numbers, so you're meant to sail carefully to avoid them. Just like I, er, didn't. I was begging my slowpoke of a boat to reach the shoreline before the enemy cannonfire sunk me. Except… it never did? Seriously, not a single shot hit me on any of my boat trips, and at one point I had several massive enemy ships on my tail.
Reaching another island for the first time feels momentous.
I'm not the only one to have had this, apparently. Either we're all incredibly lucky, it's a glitch, or the game is going easy on you early on. Understandable, but it's a little underwhelming when Blackbeard's minions pose no threat but an angry dodo can kill you in a few hits.
Reaching another island for the first time feels momentous, mind, and I like how most islands have their own questlines to follow. Sure, they all follow a similar 'pillage the corpses and read the notes' template, but the writing is fun and it's more engaging than just mining bloody copper all day.
They'll have to wait, anyway, because it's time to rescue my various crewmates. They're being held captive by pirates, often three of them. I managed to successfully save one crew member because the pirates were distracted by a giant crab. Heh heh heh – oldest trick in the book.
One camp, though, easily had half a dozen pirates in it. If Windrose has stealth options then it's hidden them ironically well. Not every game needs token stealth, of course, but it needs better combat chops than this if it's going to throw this many enemies at once at you.
With my crew reunited, I finally found a shipwreck that could be fixed up. Then, at long last – seriously, about six hours in – I was captain of a pirate ship once more. I decided to celebrate by blowing up one of Blackbeard's boats. I've moaned a little about the survival aspect, but I have to admit that after several hours of being gored by boars and chugging along in my snail boat, zooming through the high seas in my pirate ship felt amazing.
Calling the ship combat in Windrose similar to Assassin's Creed: Black Flag's is a bit like calling your reflection similar to your face. Same aiming reticule for your cannonfire. Same battle to get your massive heaving vessel into prime position before your enemy does. Same exhilarating sense that you're only a few mistakes away from Davy Jones' Locker. Then, when the enemy is weakened enough, you hop aboard for some swordplay, just like in Ubisoft's classic.
Windrose is the Black Flag multiplayer game we wanted all along.
But you know what? With three friends on your server, that might still be enough. There are far worse games to take inspiration from, and a multiplayer take on Black Flag was once the most promising game on Ubisoft's development slate. Then, after years of development hell, we got Skull and Bones, a mess of a game that lost so much of what Black Flag special. Windrose might not have the production values of Ubisoft's – sigh – AAAA title, but it is the Black Flag multiplayer game we wanted all along. With three pals, a love of the high seas and a decent bottle of grog, you could do a lot worse.
