If you’re familiar with my writing, then you know that my status as CGM’s resident Ninja automatically puts me at odds with anything pirate-related. But life is all about growth and accepting new experiences, and who am I to argue with life?
Jokes aside, I honestly didn’t realize there was as much buzz surrounding Windrose as there is. If so many people are interested in it, then there must be something to it, right? Well, after getting my hands on the Early Access build, I can safely say… it’s complicated. There are a lot of good things in Windrose, but one crucially bad thing that almost makes the whole thing fall apart.
Windrose starts when the dread pirate Blackbeard sacks the player’s ship in search of a mystical artifact. However, they’re shot through the chest and thrown overboard only to have that same artifact seemingly save their life. They awake on an unknown archipelago and need to set about the arduous task of rebuilding their ship and reestablishing their crew.
How are they going to do that? By punching trees, of course! Windrose utilizes survival/crafting elements in order to allow players to build a home base, customize their ship and craft an assortment of tools, weapons and apparel. And much to my surprise, for a game like this, these elements weren’t obnoxious. Players don’t need to manage a myriad of meters—only needing to keep an eye on hunger, but this serves a dual purpose of giving the player temporary buffs while exploring.
Furthermore, weapons and tools don’t have durability, which was genuinely a nice change for a game like this. Obviously, tools breaking is a mechanic that helps facilitate the necessity of crafting in a survival game, but Windrose approaches this with a sort of RPG logic—where higher quality tools are required to harvest higher quality materials. Once you have them, you have them forever, so it creates a nice sense of progression as you slowly build your way to better equipment.
And while I’ve never been a fan of games where building is specifically tied to your character’s position—always preferring a more freeform drag-and-drop control scheme—I can at least say building in Windrose is pretty convenient and intuitive. Players are given a decent degree of freedom in placing objects, and the whole system for creating structures is pretty player-friendly.
And now we come to that crucial “one bad thing.” Combat, and the systems built around it, in Windrose, are absolutely dreadful. Now, I want to specify that the majority of my complaints pertain to the early portions of gameplay, as once you unlock a few skills and get some better gear, it becomes a bit more manageable. Not only that, but Naval combat is pretty fun as well, and ship controls are straightforward and much more manageable.
“I can at least say building in Windrose is pretty convenient and intuitive.”
However, I think it’s important to mention because the opening hours are where you really hook your players, and almost every time I had to fight something, I wanted to close the game and never play again. The game claims to take inspiration from the Soulslike genre, but it feels like the only thing they really understood about Souls games is that enemies should kill you in one hit.
This is especially egregious in the early game when Level One Piglets and Dodos can wipe your health in two whole hits—heck, even the game’s Steam trailer shows a player getting insta-killed by a Level Two Dodo. When you need to confront more challenging enemies like zombies and mutant crabs, all bets are completely off. Attacking and dodging consumes stamina, but once your stamina is depleted, you have to wait for it to regenerate before you can perform any action—on top of the trademark exhaustive slow walk—so enemies are just given a free hit, which I’ll remind you, usually kills you instantly.
And attacking and blocking don’t really feel satisfying in their own right. Weapons all feel featherlight, and none of them have a good sense of weight or punch behind them. Even when I switched to a two-handed Halberd, my attacks went through enemies like papercuts, and any attempts at staggering were wildly inconsistent—it doesn’t help that enemies apparently don’t stagger when they’re mid-animation anyway. Blocking gives you a limit to how many hits you can take before it breaks and you take a free hit, so it hardly feels like a viable defensive option.
It just makes the start of the game so unpleasant. At a point where you have nothing and need to begin gathering the resources to rebuild, having to be constantly stopped by basic enemies that can wipe your health in a single hit and force you to run all the way from home base to where you just were is unbelievably dejecting. It’s also especially bad since those aforementioned perks/abilities take FOREVER to unlock, as EXP is only granted in certain conditions, and the basics of combat and crafting don’t go towards levelling up.
“Honestly, I hope Windrose can get some more adjustments to it because it really has a solid foundation to build on.”
It genuinely left me wondering why I would subject myself to this torture for a pretty decent pirate-themed building sim. In some ways, I feel like Windrose is built very specifically for multiplayer since having a small crew of friends would help mitigate some of the unfairness of combat—particularly when you’re forced to fight mobs of enemies—but for players seeking a solo experience, the combat needs to be RADICALLY improved and significantly balanced for me to want to return to it.
As CGM’s resident Ninja, I can’t help but feel a bit bad for the recent state of pirate games. I feel like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag set an unhealthy precedent that pirate games needed to be so heavily based on the “realism” of controlling a ship, and things just escalated from there. Pirates used to have a degree of romanticism around them—these hard-fightin’, hard-drinkin’ rebels who took what they wanted and called no man king.
But between Sea of Thieves, Skull and Bones and now this, pirates have been reduced to pathetic scavengers who need to spend hours upon hours punching trees to gather enough wood to even build a ship worth sailing, not to mention the countless hours more needed to punch more rocks and trees to upgrade it. I’m just saying, how many Ninja games can you name that require countless hours of monotonous tree punching? Not one.
Honestly, I hope Windrose can get some more adjustments to it because it really has a solid foundation to build on. Its core gameplay loop of surviving and crafting is genuinely satisfying and gives players a good sense of slow and steady progression. But at the moment, its combat is so unbearably dreadful that almost every time I was forced to engage with it, I wanted to shut the game off. It’s so close to the finish line; if it can just clear that last hurdle, it’ll be a gold medal contender.
Windrose launches in Early Access for PC on April 14th, 2026.
