Windrose Review
From Rags to Ruler of the Seas
WARNING: THIS ARTICLE MAY CONTAIN DISCUSSIONS involving SPOILERS FROM Windrose. CONSIDER WHEN AND WHERE IT WOULD BE APPROPRIATE TO READ THIS PIECE.Platforms
We reviewed our copy of Windrose on Steam. Windrose is currently only available on Steam and Epic Games Store as an early access game.Many studios have tried but few have conquered the niche pirate fantasy genre, such that there is a sea of mediocre pirate games. Windrose is one of the few pirate fantasy games that have conquered the genre, right next to the likes of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Sea of Thieves. While Windrose has not risen to the same level as those two greats, it has set the foundation to become a game that could be even better when it comes out of early access into fully released status. All this to say that Windrose is a solid, good game at the time of this review but has great potential to be even better than Black Flag and Sea of Thieves if given the time and effort from the developers.
Currently, Windrose encompasses many different types of gameplay aspects all wrapped up into one game, and it does all these aspects decently. For example, it has naval and land combat, crafting and building systems, survival and progression mechanics, exploration and story elements, and more. This is much more than Black Flag or Sea of Thieves has to offer. However, none of the gameplay aspects are done to greatness like Black Flag’s story or Sea of Thieves multiplayer. Luckily, Windrose is still in early access so there is plenty of time to improve upon all these gameplay aspects. With my 40+ hours of play time, I hope to give you an accurate review of Windrose as it is currently in May 2026, but as more content updates continue to roll out, this review may become inaccurate.
Before getting into the review, I would like to give you a quick overview of the game. Windrose was released in early access on April 14, 2026. It was developed by small, 15-person Uzbekistan-based studio, Kraken Express, and published by Pocketpair, best known for publishing Palworld which is another extremely popular fantasy survival game. Within the first couple weeks, Windrose sold over 1.5 million copies and has been considered a massive success. Due to this success, Kraken Express has promised to release 50 percent more content and continue to improve upon the current content before Windrose’s full release in the next few years. If Windrose does not seem like a game for you right now, it very well could be in the near future.
Pirate Survival
Windrose is very much a survival crafting game with a fantasy pirate story and theme. As mentioned above, survival crafting is an all-encompassing genre that can include a lot of gameplay aspects. Not a huge part of the game, but very important is the story as progressing it unlocks many of the other gameplay aspects. As the story goes, the player is a pirate captain in the West Indies in the early 18th century. Their crew comes across a mysterious artifact; unbeknownst to them, the artifact attunes to the player and makes them unable to die. Blackbeard’s, the king of the pirates, lackies intercept, steal the artifact, and sink the player’s ship and crew. The game starts when the player washes up on the shore of a deserted island after being defeated by those lackies. The entire story takes players to many islands across the West Indies in pursuit of Blackbeard and the stolen artifact to unlock its true powers. In early access, the story is not complete, but there are still dozens of hours of gameplay within the story currently available.
The rest of the survival progression and mechanics follow the story progression. From unlocking higher quality gear to earning better base and shipbuilding recipes, everything hinges on exploring and conquering the islands that the story guides the player to. Through exploration, the player levels up to become slightly more powerful, fights new enemies, and finds new resources and equipment, all of which leads them to discover new recipes to build up their base, ship, and gear. This core gameplay loop continues until the player has reached the end of the early access story and unlocked the final tier of resources currently available. Once this gameplay loop is over, the game turns into a sandbox style game where the story no longer gives any direction and the player can do whatever they like in their world. This includes building a massive pirate palace, exploring other islands the story did not lead the player to, or collecting more resources to be ready for the next content drop. All of these are strong gameplay elements of this survival crafting game and will keep players invested in the game until the next content release.
Combat systems
Careful of the crocodiles
The exploration, crafting, and base-building elements are the strongest part of Windrose that need the least improvement. The combat systems, and everything related to combat, need the most improvement. The combat-related systems include: fighting enemies on land, naval combat, both character and ship gearing, and stats and talent points. Beginning with the actual land and naval combat, alone each of these gameplay aspects feel good. The land combat is like a Souls-like game requiring somewhat precise key inputs to attack and block, dodge, and parry. The naval combat is like any other pirate games with cannon fire and boarding enemy ships. Where both combat systems begin to feel bad is with the enemies, and it is a compounding of issues that cause the weakness to really show.
First, every enemy feels the same – once you defeat a wild animal, NPC pirates, or an enemy ship, the rest feel the same even after leveling up and encountering “supposedly” new enemies. Second, the health on the enemies verses the player’s feel really mismatched. At all levels, enemies have five times the health of the player. If any enemy can kill the player in three to four hits (even with food buffs), the player will likely need to successfully land 15 to 20 hits on that same enemy to defeat it. The only exception to this is if the player heavily out-levels the enemy. Lastly, enemies are almost never fought in one-on-one scenarios. There are always around three to four (or more) of the same enemies that the player must fight at the same time, all which have the same over-tuned health. Any one of these things on its own would not be a big deal, but all together it feels excessively tedious.
There are difficulty sliders in Windrose, so players can make the game easier or harder based on their preferences. Personally, I played on the middle difficulty which states it is the difficulty “the developers intended.” It was not hard as much as it was not balanced well and I hope the developers would balance their intended difficulty better in the future.
Moving on from land and naval combat, the gearing, stats, and talent systems are somewhat tedious as well. Upgrading gear requires a lot of resources per level per piece of gear. This adds an unnecessary amount of time resource gathering just to get on the same level as the enemies. The stats and talent systems are interesting, but don’t have the impact that I think they should. Stat and talents points are obtained through leveling up, and leveling up can only be done through exploration and quest completions. Each level requires several explorations points and/or quests to be completed, which is equivalent to a few hours of gameplay per level. However, each level only makes the player very marginally stronger. Yes, the difference between level two and 15 is large, but the difference between two and five is small. All this is not to say the combat systems are bad, but it just does not feel as good as it probably should.
The talent system
Hytale Review
An exploration sandbox game with a bright futureWindrose’s Future
Windrose was developed in Unreal Engine 5, the premiere game development software. It looks great and performs and plays extremely well. It has multiplayer up to eight total players, although most players opt to play it solo. The base-building has a lot of depth to it, allowing players to build just about anything exactly how they want. The archipelago map has dozens of islands to explore with plenty of side quests. The pirate fantasy elements of drowned, undead pirates and giant crabs could be expanded on, but are thematic. There are also impeccably sung sea shanties while sailing a ship! All this combined with the promise of new content and current system improvements over the course of the early access cycle, Windrose is positioned as a very promising pirate survival game. I would say that there are no other game quite like Windrose in gaming right now. Yes, there are similarities to other games and genres, but Windrose combines it all into one.
Despite the current combat system weak points mentioned above, I am still confident in recommending this game to any gamers that are interested in the survival, base-building, and/or pirate aspects of Windrose. At its reasonable $30 price point, I think this is a fun game if you are looking for something new to play or want to hold on it for later as more content and updates are added. Alternatively, you could wait for Windrose to go on sale which is likely to come at the end of 2026 or when it releases on your preferred console as it is rumored to be released on Xbox at some point. No matter what you decide to do, Windrose has already risen to a success level where it will only get better from here, and it may even become great enough to rival Black Flag and Sea of Thieves.
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Matt
New video game, movie, or TV show? Matt probably has it on his radar, and he might even be in the middle of reviewing it. This digital entertainment enjoying dude is a Content Writer during work hours, then plays games, watches movies, binges shows, and writes about all of it in his free time.