Your intrepid heroes drink grog, sing a shanty, and sail in circles. Windward faces the CHAIRQUISITION!
Game: Windward
Webzone: Windward
Devel: Tasharen Entertainment Inc.
Engine: Unity
Price: 9.99 / CDN 10.99
Wazzat: Windward is an action-filled multiplayer sandbox game that puts you in control of a ship sailing the high seas of a large procedurally-generated world.
Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Colour key: Venn Jordan Pedro
Makes with the working
- Everything works OOTB, no complaints.
- Solid 60 @ 1080
- Behold! 8 cores on my FX 8370E and the moment you get into a multiplayer match and there are like 10 people on screen shooting and exploding, it caps 1 core at 100%
- And causes a severe performance issue.
- You can lower and increase the graphics all you want, even on Ultra at 1080p the GTX 1080 only ever uses around 20% of the GPU.
Shiny / Sounds
- Even on Ultra @ 1080p /w 28” of goodness this thing is a jag-fest.
- Sweet mothering of FK will the backround music cause you to zone the hell out / put you to sleep.
- Put on Swashbuckle’s excellent album “Crewed By the Damned”. It’s better than the soundtrack here
- Visually, it looks alright. I don’t really see how a game like this could improve in a visual fidelity sense
- For a game which only takes up 120-ish MB of disk space, it looks alright.
- It even gives you an option to disable the shiny reflections on the water to save your bitrate.
- It isn’t until you start paying attention that you see there are only 2 or 3 different buildings in towns and 5 different town “motifs”. There are 3 kinds of trees and they just get palette swapped.
- Still, when it comes to visuals, it doesn’t look awful.
- And the background music is perfect.
- As far as simple naval exploration style music goes, Windward nails it.
Control
- Wasd tank controls
- The movement is very slow, which makes sense given the fact that you’re sailing a ship, but still. Kind of contributes to the fun segment
- You can remap all the buttons except movement, but it comes with WASD, directional arrows and mouse navigation enabled by default.
- So it doesn’t really get dinged a chair for that.
- Steam controller also works out of the box, and the game does an alright job of switching between controller and keyboard prompts when you switch, too.
- The game also does a very good of making every ship feel different, including the airships and Zeppelins.
FUN
- Fetch quest, the game.
- Combat consists of sailing around in circles.
- The tutorial (if you can call it that) is damn near useless.
- There is a massive gap between where the game starts (boring) and where Pedro is at (looks kinda fun)
- To quote the IGN review for Pokemon Alpha Sapphire: “Too much Water”
- Pedro will go into the things that he enjoys about the game, and from that perspective, I can kind of see it
- It’s pretty low stress, repetitive and boring
- It’s just not the right kind of boring for me.
- You pretty much saw that during the stream. Waiting to capture the village points in the combat thing was just so boring, I stopped doing it. It was more fun to just gang up and blow up the infinitely spawning pirate ships
- Maybe there’s some more engaging stuff later on, but I can’t be arsed to get to that point
- This is my zen game.
- This the game I play when I just want to sail around doing menial stuff with nice ambient music playing.
- Windward is my No Man’s Sky.
- Just like No Man’s Sky, there isn’t a lot else to do once you’ve played a few hours, bought all the ships and upgraded your equipment.
- The advantage Windward has over No Man’s Sky, is that it actually does have Multiplayer.
- You can join one of the official servers, you can host your own server, you can play co-op, you can do PVP, and you can even do epic RAIDs to try and kill a dragon.
- Yes, thar be dragons!
- The fact I’ve sunk 51 hours into such a simple and small game should tell you everything you need to know.
- I really like Windward.
- If I had to pick something for them to improve, it’d be the change from the top down isometric camera to a 3rd person style. And maybe allow you to exit the ship and explore the towns on foot.
- But at that point I’d be asking for them to make a better Curse of the Raven’s Cry.