Windward Review (PC)

Windward is a small indie role-playing game where you try to make a name for yourself on the procedurally generated high seas.

I've always liked pirates and seafaring games, and ever since sinking quite a bit of time into the old High Seas Trader and Sea Legends, I have been open to such titles, welcoming them with open arms.

The allure of swashbuckling adventures is undeniable, and given that the chance that I could actually become a buccaneer is null, my best bet is to indulge in the virtual life of crime offered by video games.

Tasharen Entertainment's sandbox game seemed like a pretty good choice, especially since it appeared to be simple and action-packed, while also featuring some degree of complexity, enough to make it a more interesting experience than a straight-up top-down shooter.

Capturing two points at once

Starting out

You start out by pledging your allegiance to one of four factions, specializing in combat, trade, diplomacy, or exploration. The actual action takes place on a random map that looks like a fat octopus, with tendrils reaching outward, and with the factions starting out at the end of its tentacles.

The starting areas are dominated by your faction, which means that there isn't that much enemy activity, only a few pirate ships, enough to explore the base game mechanics and engage in some easy battles.

You then set sail between the cities on the map, doing various quests, ranging from charting out a distant port to delivering goods or taking passengers on a cruise. In addition to this, you can also purchase various goods and try to make it big by buying low and selling high, based on whatever city's demands are, and on the tips you can get in the tavern.

Finding your way around the map is easy, as you can quickly focus on one of the quests you have currently undertaken in order to highlight the route to the point of interest you are looking for.

Evidently, I picked the combat-oriented faction, because I was planning to line the bottom of the ocean with the sunken ships of no-good pirates.

You start out with a small ship that only has two cargo slots, which means that you won't really be able to become a masterful trader right away, and that you will only be able to undertake two quests at a time.

Fortunately, once you come into possession of the appropriate amount of gold, new ships become available in certain ports, and you'll be able to upgrade your stats significantly.

Speaking of upgrades, they are also available in smaller forms. Your ship has a sort of paper doll inventory, where you can outfit new cannons, ammunition, crew members, captain, ships and hull, in order to become the master of the seas.

You can trade for the items in the towns around the map or get them as drops after sinking enemy ships, and they're also a pretty important source of income early on.

You also have a talent tab where you can spend points accrued from leveling up, gaining minor bonuses to sailing speed, cannon accuracy and range, or hull hit points, which makes adventuring more exciting and allows you to customize your skill set to your preferred experience.

Mr. Pirate, you seem to be in trouble

Exploring the world

In the beginning, it's a pretty good idea to run errands around the map, even if it can be repetitive, in order to get some upgrades and the next best ship, before venturing outside the starting area.

Each map represents one square of the bigger octopus map, and they get increasingly more difficult. If fighting off a pirate ship in the starting area is no challenge at all, after doing the same in the second one, you're going to have to stop for repairs, provided you make it out alive.

At first, things are pretty fun, but they unfortunately start being really repetitive once you do move up in the world and see that not enough new mechanics get added to the initial recipe.

You can hire nearby friendly ships in order to assemble a mini-fleet that can offer you an edge against pirates, especially when laying siege to towns defended by cannon towers, but the array of upgrades and new abilities doesn't really add enough depth to the experience.

There are some pretty good ideas too, such as the fact that cities level up alongside you, as you pick up quests and complete them, getting increasingly better items and slightly more complex missions for you to undertake.

The bad thing is that, once you get the basic gameplay loop going, the game seems to be veering off into a very vague direction.

“Once you get the basic gameplay loop going, the game loses focus and veers off into a pretty vague direction, without offering you any clear objectives to strive for”

You transport cargo and passengers between towns, you hunt down pirates, occupy their ports and chase them out, expanding the influence of your faction, but there is no greater goal and not enough complexity to quests and trading to make it feel entirely worthwhile after the novelty wears off.

The maps themselves are pretty small, and it never takes more than a few minutes to complete a mission. This makes it feel less like an open seas saga and more like a constant grind for gold and experience, chasing the next available upgrade, instead of making the upgrades feel like a bonus feature.

Quests are overly simplistic and repetitive, and the most complex require you to travel between three towns for no good reason. Even when you stumble upon mysterious sealed letters that at first glance promise an intriguing and perhaps clandestine adventure, you are rewarded with pretty much the same things, sail to a certain port and get some gold and experience points.

This unfortunately makes the game seem small and too lightweight, without having anything greater to strive for, aside from some unlocks that turn out to be pretty disappointing, overall.

Even the ships themselves don't feel too different from one another. A better one simply sails a little faster and has more hit points, and maybe an additional cargo slot.

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Combat and late game

One of the reasons Windward caught my eye was the combat. It seemed simple and direct but also a bit complex due to the large number of abilities featured at the bottom of the screen in trailers.

Now, I feel a bit disappointed. Your cannons only fire broadside, which is as expected, but they do so automatically, and you don't even get a choice in the matter.

Your only job is to maintain your position, or better yet fool the pirate ship on your tail to chase you, so you can move in a winding fashion, which lets both sides of your ship unleash volleys upon it. Unfortunately, they actually fall for it, as the artificial intelligence isn't exactly on par with a naval commander who knows what they are doing.

Enemies are fodder for the most part, and the only decisive factors are health and damage, to a much greater degree than I would have liked them to be.

Sure, there is some degree of tactical interaction when it comes to battles, such as firing chains in order to hit the enemy ship's sails and hamper its maneuverability, but you can really use your allied ships to capitalize on that, and it just feels a bit too flimsy.

Encounters are also over really, really fast, and due to the small size of the maps, they don't entail too much maneuvering, being, for the most part, a case of parking your ship next to the enemy's and trading blows until one of you starts taking on water.

Roaming the maps in search of pirates to pound is fun in the beginning, but the action never really seems to take off beyond the base mechanics, in spite of all the abilities you gain as you progress.

It's still a matter of whether or not the computer will generate more ships than you can handle at any given time, and this is, of course, assuming that you chose the combat-oriented faction.

Trying to play the peaceful trader is impossible once you get into areas of conflict, where you have to first pacify the local pirates, recapture the towns, and only then be allowed to conduct your occupation of choice.

There is also no way to protect areas that you have captured from being taken over by pirates, aside from stumbling into a port that sells the do-it-yourself kit necessary to set up a cannon tower, and even then, it's not a reliable system.

The other ships in your faction don't seem to care all that much whether your outposts get overrun by pirates, which is again disappointing and makes the game feel flimsy.

This is further compounded by the fact that, if you've seen one map, you've seen them all, and the whole game is just a matter of grinding until yours becomes the dominant faction in any given map, before venturing into the next one.

There are no unique points of interest or other meaningful features that warrant exploring, no surprises, just the same old boring fetch quests and uncoordinated pirates to fight. There are also some instances, which are really maps where you have to kill all the pirates, but they don't add anything new.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion