Windrose (Early Access Preview)

Do you yearn for the pirate life but the yearning is so strong you can't wait for Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced? Can I interest you in Windrose?

A mixture of a fairly run of the mill survival crafting simulator with a pretty decent piratical sailing system, Windrose is surprisingly difficult to stop playing at the end of a session.

The introductory cutscene for the game has your ship being boarded by a rival pirate looking to plunder some kind of mystical rock you've just discovered. While most of the game, particularly in the early sections, is grounded in reality, there are fantasy elements scattered throughout. Zombies can be found in some locations and one of the bosses, without spoiling it, definitely has some otherworldly assistance.

But the gist of the game will be familiar to you if you have played any of the dozens of other survival-crafting games out there, from Minecraft to Valheim to Enshrouded. You start with nothing and must collect basic sticks and rocks to fashion yourself some essential tools, which allow you to harvest higher tier materials and build yourself a shelter. In your shelter you can store what you've gathered until you have enough to build crafting tables, which enable the building of more advanced gear, and so on.

Port Kev - Built by Jerresh on GalaxyAUS's community server.

One huge advantage Windrose has over many other games in the genre is the materials stored in your chests are directly accessible at your crafting tables, cooking fires and so on. So long as you've built your storage chests within range of your central bonfire, your materials will be available for crafting new items. This might not seem like a big deal, but if you've played a lot of other games where you need to have everything in your inventory, you'll find it very hard to go back once you've experienced the convenience.

After you've established a small camp and built some rudimentary tools you'll be given access to your first boat - a very small dinghy. But it has a sail and will get you between the many islands of the game. It's also indestructible. You can sail right up to enemy ships if you want, it's fine. Really. But don't jump on board, they all have infinite pirates if you haven't boarded them "properly".

Learned that one the hard way.

Once you have your little boat you can start chasing down clues to the pirate who stole your MacGuffin and left you with some weird affliction that prevents you from dying. The death penalty in Windrose is pretty lenient, with you only losing any crafting materials you were carrying at the time. All your weapons and clothing stay with you, no matter what.

Assuming you survive exploring the other islands long enough and can successfully raid a couple of pirate camps you will eventually be able to repair your much larger ship. You'll need what seems like an enormous amount of materials to do so, so be careful carrying them from your base to the location, but once you get get your ship back the game starts to really open up.

Repairing the Ketch - you can rename it if you prefer - makes it a lot quicker to sail between islands, which is nice. But the real benefit of the ketch is you can finally equip cannons! You'll need to craft and upgrade those yourself, which you'll want to prioritise, so you can finally return fire when Blackbeard's pirates come calling. Later, you can buy larger cannons for the bigger ships, or ones with special skills attached, but a basic set of 12-pound cannons will get you a long way.

Starbug II - IYKYK

Ship to ship combat is not quite as involved as it was in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag as you don't need to consider wind direction when sailing. This makes things a little more simple when it comes to positioning your ship, but it cuts both ways as enemies can just as easily sail around you as you can around them. Broadside cannons are the most effective, as they were in reality, but you're also given two cannons at the bow of your ship, for firing as you sail towards enemies. While aiming you are given a visual indicator of the expected arc of your shots, but you also need to consider flight time. If you aim at the stern of a ship as it sails past, you're probably going to miss. And at long range, you may even need to aim ahead of an enemy ship to ensure the cannonballs arrive as the ship rushes to meet them.

An added wrinkle is the waves. While their intensity doesn't seem dictated by weather, there is occasionally a much bigger swell of water. You can ride up and down these without fear of sinking, but you can't shoot through them. It's hard to deliberately take advantage of this in combat, but with a little luck you can grab a few extra seconds to help patch up the hull ahead of the next broadside.

After sailing - and fighting - for a while, completing quests and building up your base, you'll come across the first boss of the game. If you're playing on the recommended difficulty level you will not be prepared for how much harder this guy can be. By now you're probably used to either running in for a few slashes with your sword, then dodging and backing away to recover stamina, or perhaps you're good enough to block enemy attacks.

Won't matter. He's got you covered, easily. Go back and upgrade your gear, come back later.

But once you do beat him, you technically unlock the next region of the game, with the next tier of materials. You could actually go there before beating him, but you don't get the necessary recipes to refine the newer materials until you've progressed the story past that specific point.

Which is my one real gripe with the game. While most of the gameplay is freeform in nature, there are hard gates on certain advancements. Many crafting recipes unlock simply by discovering a new plant, or killing a new kind of creature, except to advance to a higher tier requires killing one specific guy. You can reduce the difficulty level of your world at any time, kill him, then put it back. But that feels like cheating.

A terrible tower I built. I will get better.

Otherwise, Windrose is a fantastic game. I have lost more than a few nights to emptying mines of their copper and iron, building ludicrously tall towers only to pull them down again, sinking or boarding pirate ships or just sailing with the sea shanties being sung by my crew. Playing with talented builders is amazing, watching a whole town spring from nothing is very cool. But so is fumbling through the bushes trying to stab boars with your equally useless mates. It's probably the most fun pirate life sim out right now.