WindForge Review

And then, with a single terrible swing, Windforge strikes a massive blow against this, its greatest strength. Have you perhaps been wondering how exactly I managed to end up in such awkward situations? Was I not more careful when entrusted with such a precarious and easily-damaged method of transport? Well yes, I initially was, and I imagine I would have stayed that way if my character hadn't sneaked off to a Planetside 2 server while my back was turned and nicked an engineer's repair tool. You can, without any penalty or consumption of resources whatsoever, quickly fix anything man-made in the entire game, and with that kind of power in your hands most of the challenge of airship combat simply evaporates. You could be standing on top of a pile of smouldering timbers, tattered cloth and scrap metal that, with just a few quick sweeps from the repair tool, will miraculously reform back into a functioning escape vehicle in seconds. There's no reason to exercise caution when there's little to no penalty for failure. Couldn't you have contrived some elaborate reason for this repair tool to run on money, Windforge? I would have teased you, for sure, but it's better than this. Or, if that isn't an option, you could have made it so that the repair process isn't so rapid that I can get shot out of the sky and still return my vessel to pristine condition before I even hit a tree. This is another situation where my patented 'whale oil as a tangible resource' game mechanic would have worked nicely.

Actually, now that I reflect on it, you're far more likely to encounter a loading screen than an obstacle while you're speeding towards your impromptu date with the planetary core, and I was meaning to rag on this so I suppose this is as good a time as any. Part of what builds the atmosphere in other procedurally-generated games like Minecraft or Terraria is that – barring the occasional trans-dimensional portal – there are no loading boundaries. Everything seamlessly unrolls beneath you, giving the illusion of a huge unbroken world that does wonders for creating a sense of scale and majesty as you hammer together your first crude wooden hut. By contrast, Windforge's map is divided into a finite grid, where each cell represents an area and each grid line represents another excuse to get up, stretch, and grab another biscuit from the pantry. It can get terribly flow-breaking, especially when you're trying to travel across the map quickly and you end up with a trip that's sixty percent actual flight and forty percent waiting for the next area to load.

The thing about Windforge is that it has very obviously taken a sizeable step forward from its inspirations, which is a pleasing thing to see, but it seems to be out of stride because not all of it seems to have moved forward at the same time. In spite of the game's pretensions to being part-RPG, the actual business of levelling your stats is a bit unusual and somewhat marginalised. You automatically gain various perks once a stat reaches a certain level – double jump at agility level 20, more health recovered from food at vitality level 20, etcetera – which is a bit simplistic but at least offers some interesting incentives to level up. Much more bizarre is the complete omission of experience points. If you want to level up – and you will, because the story quests tend to seriously pile on the enemies – you will need to brew various magical potions that will arbitrarily increase certain stats once consumed. Even better, the central ingredient in these potions is a rare item found only from defeating bosses and looting temples, so grinding is essentially impossible. Now see here, Windforge: I hate grind. I loathe the idea that I should have to repeatedly complete a boring, unsatisfying task for the sake of overcoming an obstacle. I am absolutely with you on your philosophy here. However, sometimes grind is necessary. What am I supposed to do if I find myself totally overwhelmed when faced with the next big story quest? Like it or not, RPGs need grind, even if it's just a safety net for terminally-thick players like yours truly.

Of course, in a normal action RPG the general understanding between the player and the game is that the player will be able to overcome their inferior levels with enough gumption, skill and cheesing ability – see also, the complete finger-chewing nutters who do level 1 Dark Souls runs – but this rather relies on the game actually having some nuance and skill to its combat mechanics, which sadly isn't quite the case: you can jump, crouch, and shoot. If you happened to put on your fancy pants this morning then you can try grappling to higher ground or digging yourself a hidey-hole, but it's usually an impractical solution when the simple art of 'pressing the trigger until everything in front of you dies' works just fine. Bullets fly slower than an overweight pigeon and have roughly the same level of impact when they hit something, making an actual shoot-out about as involving as lobbing wads of mud at each other. That's before you get to the fights with the local wildlife, where half of the mud you lob at them ends up missing entirely because they have about three animation frames that they jump erratically between like a flip-book with most of the pages torn out.

Poor animations are just one of the signs that Windforge is suffering from a severe polish deficiency. It's all very well saying that good gameplay will triumph over a few rough edges, but when you don't appear to have any actual smooth edges remaining on a game that – as we have established – isn't exactly lighting any fireworks to begin with, it becomes harder and harder to ignore. There's a serious dearth of sound effects that becomes particularly noticeable when your enormous four-deck airship with enough heavy armament to powderise an island is capable of taking off and flying without a single peep from its bank of heavy steel propellers. There's no logical point where autosaves trigger, forcing you to rely on a save system that tells you nothing about when or where you made your last save, and the interface has more than a few annoyances too, like the way you can't enter a specific value for items that you plan to craft or trade. Blocks have an effect going on where they project a certain distance into the background, creating an illusion of depth that looks nice in screenshots but makes precision building and mining a nightmare. Often the visuals are so densely packed and lacking in clear design that it becomes hard to tell the difference between a solid ceiling, a specially-formulated platform and a piece of intrusive background art. I suspect that this is, at least partially, the reason why the framerate becomes so atrocious when the game starts rendering anything more complex than a pile of bricks hovering in an empty void. Come on guys, it's not exactly Unreal Engine 4.

Oh, and there are bugs, of course. Hardly a surprise in itself, but Windforge's bugs are of that special variety that seem to be actively spiting you, deliberately piling tragedy upon tragedy. It's not enough for me to get stuck in the terrain, is it? I also have to be catapulted back out, after a brief struggle, with enough speed to instantly splatter me across a cave ceiling. It's not enough that bits of my airship vanish into the ether without rhyme or reason; some of them will have to be entirely replaced instead of being repaired. It's not enough that I have to wrestle with this uninformative minimal save system; the game has to randomly corrupt about two thirds of my save files as well. I pity those people who relied on autosave and discovered one morning that they couldn't actually continue the game anymore. Wait, never mind. That would imply that they were missing out on something.

There was a patch, mind. I downloaded it this morning. It broke my last remaining save file, so I suppose that's the end of that.

And yet, as illustrated in the opening paragraph of this exercise in torturous drawn-out whining, there's something senselessly entertaining about Windforge, like riding a rusty bicycle with only rudimentary steering around an overgrown paddock full of bears. The airship combat can be a jolly good time if the circumstances align themselves properly, and if it had been the central mechanic in a polished game that made the most of it then we would have probably had a winner on our hands. As it is, it's a single gem of well-executed innovation resting in the centre of a fetid pile of weak design, and the few brief moments where you see it shining are hardly worth the slog. Windforge is crudely-made, incompetently paced, and broken in all sorts of important ways. You just can't sell it on a single feature after a statement like that, can you?