First off, this game has some incredible bones. Rarely does a game reach EA and have this much that simply works. Very impressed.

For now, I’ve completed the 3rd boss, built a decent base, have a maxed out frigate and personal equipment, every quest/exploration is done. What I’m missing is the total list of cosmetics, which cost a fortune in gold coins I am not willing to farm for. 40 gold for a set of sail colors… nah. Took a good chunk and honestly, I barely saw the time go by,

In all of these games, there are a few main pieces that are key.

Base Building

Can you build castles and villas? Yup. Can your base be attacked? Nope.

This is standard fare, though the unlocking of recipes to build stuff takes a long time to get complete. Tool snapping works, and the visuals as solid. The space you’re given to build in is fairly large. The materials you need to have on hand to build something neat star somewhat small, but eventually get absolutely massive. Wood harvesting is pretty easy. Stone harvesting… not so much.

Exploration

Discovering new things is fun. Island exploration is often deadly and beautiful. Each island is a set piece, but the spawn around the larger sea map can be random. Now the real kicker here is that character progression is entirely related to exploration and questing. The max level is 15, and you will need to complete 95% of all exploration/quests to reach that point.

Ship exploration is a challenge due to draw distances. Quest markers can indicate the direction of travel, but actually finding all the islands requires a lot of work. Could certainly be improved here. You want to visit every island!

I should note that the quests here are much better than I had expected. Sure, there are some ‘go to A and come back’ quests, but they force you to explore. There’s only 1 fetch quest I saw. And ship combat quests are thankfully limited.

You’ll also gain the ability to teleport with Bells set up on shores. You can set up to 10 Bells. The good news is that each boss also has a teleported, and every faction base as well. You’ll want to put these up on islands with harvestable resources.

Harvesting & Crafting Material

The harvesting cycle is like other games, with a twist. 99% of every item in game can respawn (plague wood is the exception). You may need to wait 6 hours to respawn (offline time works too), but it does come back. The material gathering isn’t super grindy either. Sure, you’ll need to visit that first copper mine about 8 times overall, but that should be enough.

Stack levels and storage containers can be a challenge, especially for food items.

You’ll eventually unlock merchants from whom you can buy stacks of material. Hardwood is the only thing I ever bought, as the cost in piastre is fairly excessive, and only when I decided to build a frigate.

Crafting automatically pulls from storage, which is amazing! Crafting stations are what you expect, with upgrades as well. This part works incredibly well!

Ship Combat

A simpler version than most games you have played. Cannons have arcs, waves can slow them down as well. Very simplistic, and it looks cool as heck when in a battle.

A note on boarding. This part is fundamentally broken due to enemy AI. There are are no rewards that are worth boarding, just sink the ships.

Melee Combat

Much different than all other survival games, you can dodge to avoid attacks, or parry to potentially stun them. The game truly excels in 1:1 fights, in particular the fun boss battles. 2 or 3 enemies, it can get hectic as the enemy AI will swarm you. If you trigger 5 or more enemies, you will likely be stun locked and die. Every ship boarding activity is this. Not sure how this can be addressed.

Note, there are 2 quests that require you to board an enemy ship with at least a dozen attackers. They will continue to spawn until you kill them on the ship. These are really bad quests and you should ‘cheese’ it by using the bow of the enemy ship as a railing and attack from range.

Death is not punishing at all. You keep all your gear and hotbar items and simply need to get back to your corpse to get your gear. Don’t die halfway across the map mind you!

I do enjoy the build variety here. Single handed weapons are much different than 2 handers and ranged. The passives on items influence how you’ll play as well.

Progression

I mentioned character progression above which gives you stat points and talents. Talents are pretty straightforward, but you won’t have many of them. Stats… put it in vitality and stamina equally until you reach the 2nd zone. There’s a distinct lack of information as to how stats work, I wrote about that in another post.

Equipment must be upgraded to the maximum level. The stats they show (offense and defense) are frankly meaningless, the only thing that matters is the level of the item vs the level of the enemy. This is poorly explained in-game.

Overall

There are a lot of games in this genre, many of them designed for multiple players. Minecraft originally started here and look where we’re at!

Windrose does bring some new things to the table, but mostly adds quality of life features to the rest. Generally, this game respects your time and effort, which is the only way games like this can succeed today. It plays smooth, looks great, and beat the Black Flag remake to the punch.

The question then becomes – what’s next? A new biome for sure, that’s clear. More ships? More enemy variety? More base building tools? Heck, is there staying power here? What’s here is very solid, and well worth your eyes if the genre is of interest. Congrats to the devs on getting this out the door with so much polish.