Crosswind Reviews

Not Recommended This game feels like an attempt to copy Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, but it falls short in almost every area. The original game is simply better. The biggest issue is the excessive grind. Right from the start, you're expected to spend hours chopping trees, gathering resources, and building basic structures. Instead of feeling like a pirate, you end up feeling like a lumberjack. The quest design is also disappointing. The main character is supposed to be a pirate, but most of the time you're just running errands for everyone else. Go there, bring this, help that person for free, then move on to the next task. Combat leaves a lot to be desired. It feels simplistic and doesn't reward player skill enough to make fights engaging. Traveling around the world is slow and inconvenient. The game constantly sends you across the map, turning a large portion of the playtime into repetitive travel. It feels like artificial padding designed to stretch the game's length rather than provide meaningful content. The level system is another major problem. If an enemy is just one or two levels above you, the fight becomes disproportionately difficult. Player skill matters very little compared to character level and gear progression. Overall, instead of a fun pirate adventure, I got a grind-heavy experience filled with tedious travel, uninspiring combat, and questionable progression systems. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it.

Valheim started dating AC: Black Flag and before they went to a couples therapy, they met with Enshrouded and together they made a bit mean and dumb, yet beautiful baby. Yes, there are few sus decisions. Yes, I start to hate locking progress into zones and grind in these type of games. Yes my Graphic Card (3080Ti) sound like an Airbus 380 taking off for the whole time the game is on... but omg, is it a beautiful ride with my Frigate called "Diplomatico" loaded with 36 cannons during sunset to the group of ships way below my level while my sailors sing a song (B key, you are welcome). Also even though I didn't had to courage to measure actual CPU / GPU performance, very rarely I had framedrops on 4K / 60FPS / Epic settings. Honorable mention: there are games where a corpse dissapear when you turn around.. and then there is Windrose, keeping that one rock you threw away because you had no space in backpack - keeping it on the ground on exactly same spot on an Island where you've been 40hrs of gameplay ago. I really want to know what witchraft this save system is.

I'm about 45 hours in, and nowhere near end game so from an OpenWorld aspect the game is quite big. Great game so far for being EA. Loving the base building. Story is engaging enough too. I feel the combat could be improved as well as the battles out at sea. Once you do a few of them, they are kind of mundane. Decent game so far, excited to see what shape the game is in, in a years time.

The game looks great and does more things right than wrong, it has potential. What I dislike the most is the combat....combat at sea or on land. Everything will aggro, never found any passive creatures in this game, like seabirds, dolphins, etc. Also all combat is usually vs multiple mobs, You will be fighting something and 2 more will join and it just becomes kind of clunky spam fest, the best combat rotation I found was attack, attack, dodge and that combo is the rest of the game, every fight, its attack, attack, dodge, that's it!....it becomes mindless and boring. The sea combat is always vs 3 ships at a time, doesn't feel epic...its just drive in a circle and shoot. I found that the sea combat was taxing, unrewarding, and was more enjoyable to avoid other ships, however, it's like frogger of the sea avoiding ships and that is actually a funner mechanic than battling them. The sea is littered with ships, they are all the same, if you had one ship battle then you have seen it all, same boats, same ai, same combat, etc, etc. It became very stale very quick. The crafting and building is fantastic but a lot of it feels meaningless. The graphics look great. Fetch quests are meh. Combat is boring and taxing. Like all survival games, the end game... what is there to do after crafting and seeing everything? Hopefully in a few years there will be more meat on the bone and I can change this review but for now 11 hours of gameplay is all I can take.

After 19h I believe the game is mostly hype with very little substance. Apart from the pirate theme, there is not a single thing which elevates it over other games of the survival/exploration genre. - Combat on land is dull. Combat on sea is dull. Combat in general is mostly pointless, as it doesn't give you any experience outside of quests. For farming resources you need it, otherwise just don't bother... - Progression takes far too long. It is simply not fun to still use starting resources 10h into the game. You can defeat the region threats rather early on to go to the next area, but for a decent fight you need a lot of experience, which you only get through quests and exploration. And the amout of quests is rather limited. - Enemy AI is very lackluster. However, the game looks and runs very nice. In time my gripes may be solved. Edit: I have finished everything the early access version has to offer. I am still truly disappointed. While combat on land got slightly more interesting due to the special weapons you can find in the swamp, ship combat is still incredibly dull. There is literally no reason to do ship combat in a pirate game, outside of getting money, which is so abundant, that it is pointless. There was a very great pirate game available many, many years ago: Sid Meier’s Pirates! (Gold Edition). While it didn't have a lot of features, it felt as though you were a pirate. In Windrose you feel like a generic survival protagonist with a ship.

After the intitial hype, 70 hrs playtime and most frustrating experience yesterday, I feel like i can give my take on this game in its current state. I would not describe this as a pirate game, but an Open World Survivalcraft game with a pirate-ish setting. What do I mean by that? The usual perception of pirates is not bulding a home/base, fight wildlife and fantasy creatures most of the time, collect tons of resources and fight exclusively other pirates at sea. You will grind resources for hours to progress. Given that some of them take a long time to grow and convert into different materials, it is even days of grind. That might be an option for real MMO's, but not for a Singleplayer or Co-op game. I don't consider mods to be a viable reason to not adress this. At no point in this game will you feel like becoming a powerful pirate. You progress to catch up and become equals to the top tier mobs in the current tier area you are in. After you unlock the next part of the map, you start from the bottom again. Again, that is MMO Gamedesign. Right from the start even a damn Dodo is a challenge for you. Although it might be part of the story (which I did not really follow), I find it boring to only have one faction to fight, Blackbeard. All ships are a variaton of his. Blackbeard's Interceptor, Blackbeards Gunboat, etc. That guy's fleet is bigger than the spanish Armada. Which leads me to another problem. The frequency and density of enemy ship groups. I fell like there are too many of them on the ocean when you are weak so you have to evade them alot, but when you are strong enough and need their loot, they vanish and you have to look for them. The ship design or camera angels need a rework. The front aiming is hindered by the bow's construction. Many times I was convinced I aimed precisely, but the shots missed anyway. Some critical resources to upgrade gear to a higher rarity are limited because they can neither be bought nor crafted, only found. So if you think you wasted them on the wrong weapons, tough luck. Some others are only dropped by mobs. Without them you can't craft the better healing potions or smelt metals into ingots. The melee combat might need an overhaul. Dodging an attack at thre wrong moment can still get you hit, even when it looks like you too far away to be hit, while dodging at the right monment saves you, even when the mob is literally hugging you. Distance is irrelevant, timing is not. In a later stage they mix melee with ranged enemies. Those ranged units even hit you with a melee unit blocking line of sight. I am a mighty pirate....running away. I would argue the game was overhyped at the begining because people like to ♥♥♥♥ on Ubisoft for Skull & Bones. But Windrose becomes repetitive, tedious and frustrating rather fast. I spend 80% of the time running across islands to gather resources, and that is not what the trailers made me believe I would do. Ships and sea battles are rather side activities. Their main purpose is to take you to new islands so you can place fast travel on them. Once that's done, they lose much of their appeal and purpose.

This game is promising, but the combat is a deal breaker. 1:1 it is uninspired and you end up just waiting to block attacks to wear down your opponent which eventually allows you to beat them. You will rapidly, however, start encountering multiple enemies at the same time. When that happens the flawed combat system forces you to either kite enemies all over the map to force 1:1 engagements or be pecked to death with effectively unblockable attacks from multiple enemies. Some weapons mitigate this a little bit, but ultimately it is you vs the game engine.

I like it, for an early access game we've had quite a lot of fun. The building is pretty good, the ship fights are fun, nice graphics etc. Been waiting for a pirate game like that for a while. BUT it has two very big weaknesses and I hope they are working on that. 1. Character progression, you dont get stronger, you dont get any new abilities. The enemies just become stronger and you have to upgrade your gear to deal damage again. You also dont really get new weapons or gear, you just upgrade the set you got at the beginning. 2. This includes that you dont get new gear. The second and for me biggest weakness is the loot. Its dull, opening a chest is never exciting, sometimes you get new decorations to build for your base, sometimes you get a piece of gear or weapon that you already had but most of the time you get the same "treasures" that you can sell at vendors for silver/gold. Theres never anything cool in these chests, no random drops, no epics, no legendaries, no new sets, nothing to upgrade your ship. Same for monsters, they drop the same loot every time.

bought this game on 5th of may and as of the 2nd of june ive racked 300 hours i cant stop playing this game its like crack for adhd

[b] WINDROSE Review — A Pirate Survival Game That Has the Look, But Not the Hook [/b] Rating: 6/10 WINDROSE is not a bad game. In fact, I think the core idea is strong. A pirate survival game is something a lot of people have wanted for a long time, especially with how starved the pirate genre has been since games like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Sid Meier’s Pirates! gave players that fantasy of sailing, raiding, fighting, and carving out a name on the open sea. But after trying WINDROSE, my honest reaction is that it feels more like Valheim with a pirate theme than a true pirate power fantasy. That is not automatically a bad thing. Survival-crafting games have an audience, and WINDROSE clearly understands that there is demand for a co-op pirate adventure where players can explore, gather resources, fight enemies, command ships, and live inside a stylized pirate world. The problem is that the pirate fantasy, at least for me, does not fully come alive through survival mechanics alone. When I think of pirates, I do not just think of chopping wood, gathering materials, crafting, and slowly working through survival loops. I think of reputation. I think of ships. I think of ports, factions, crews, trade routes, betrayal, naval warfare, treasure, wanted status, rival captains, forts, smuggling, and building enough power that the world starts to react to your name. That is where WINDROSE feels limited. The game has the surface appeal of piracy, but not enough of the deeper systems that would make me feel like I am becoming a feared pirate captain. It gives you the costume, the ships, the setting, and the general vibe, but it does not fully deliver the feeling of building a pirate legacy. Instead, it often feels like the pirate theme is wrapped around a familiar survival-craft structure. That is probably why the game did not fully click with me. It is okay. It has potential. But it is also kind of boring if you are looking for more than the usual survival loop. The strongest thing WINDROSE has going for it is timing. There are not many modern pirate games that are actively giving players something close to the Black Flag itch. Because of that, WINDROSE benefits from being in a genre with a hungry audience. People want pirate games. People want ships. People want naval combat. People want the fantasy of sailing into danger with a crew behind them. But being one of the few games in that space does not automatically make it great. It just means people are willing to give it more patience because there are not many alternatives. For players who love survival games, WINDROSE may work much better. If you enjoy the rhythm of gathering, building, crafting, upgrading, and exploring with friends, the pirate setting gives that formula a fun coat of paint. It can absolutely serve as a decent co-op pirate survival game. But for players looking for a more ambitious pirate experience, it may feel underwhelming. The crew systems, world reactivity, faction depth, economic impact, and long-term pirate progression are the areas that would need to be much stronger for WINDROSE to truly become something special. A pirate game should not just ask whether you can survive. It should ask whether you can rise. Whether you can become feared. Whether you can control trade, raid settlements, build a fleet, make enemies, gain allies, and shape the world around your actions. That is the difference between pirate survival and pirate thriving. WINDROSE currently feels more like the former. You survive as a pirate-themed character in a survival world. That can be fun, but it does not fully capture the larger fantasy of becoming a pirate lord. I also think WINDROSE may face a challenge once bigger pirate titles or remasters return to the conversation. A lot of players are probably using it to scratch that Black Flag itch, but if something closer to that cinematic pirate adventure comes back, WINDROSE may lose some of that attention unless it deepens its own identity. It cannot just rely on being “the pirate survival game.” It needs stronger reasons for players to stay. To be fair, the game does have a foundation. The concept is marketable. The pirate theme is appealing. The world has promise. There is definitely an audience for it. But for me personally, it does not hit the full pirate fantasy I want. I wanted more command. More consequence. More crew personality. More faction pressure. More economic control. More reason to care about the world beyond just surviving in it. As it stands, WINDROSE is a decent pirate survival game, but not a great pirate game. It has the sails. It has the ocean. It has the skeleton of something bigger. But it still needs more weight, more ambition, and more systems that make the player feel like they are not just playing in a pirate world, but actually changing it. [b]Final Verdict[/b]: WINDROSE is okay. It is not terrible, and survival fans may enjoy it a lot more than I did. But for me, it feels too much like a survival-crafting game wearing pirate clothes, rather than a true pirate power fantasy. It has potential, but it needs more depth before it becomes the kind of pirate game that truly stands out. 6/10 - solid idea, decent foundation, but not enough depth to keep me hooked.