WindForge Review

Today, partially in the interests of transparency but mostly for the sake of easing into this review via a healthy dose of juxtaposition, I'd like to provide a little insight into how I lay the groundwork for the thinly-disguised rants that you see here every few weeks or so. The normal course of action, you see, is to buy a game that looks interesting, download it, play it for a few hours and think “Hmm, this isn't very good. Now, why is that?” However, things progressed somewhat differently for Windforge. First and foremost this is because I hadn't heard even the slightest whisper of its existence until it was deposited, swaddled in rags, on my doorstep by a mysterious cloaked stranger. The second difference occurred when I played it, at which point I thought “Hmm, this isn't very good. So why am I still having fun?”

Windforge is, mechanically at least, a Terraria clone, but only in the sense that it straddles the same line that Doom clones and GTA clones once edged their way over, maturing into genres of their own once people realised that there was enough potential for variety in them. You can do all the things befitting of a Terraria clone, and to be fair you're never strictly obliged to go beyond that if that's really your thing, but the game will certainly make its fair share of meaningful coughs if you don't. Do you really want to sit on this floating island and spend another hour furnishing the upper dining hall? There's a big world out there, you know. Steampunk adventure! Action-RPG elements! A generic half-baked story!

Alright, let's be fair here: I mean 'generic' for a steampunk story, which is still something of a breath of fresh, oil-tinged air in the grand world of videogame storytelling. You, the protagonist, live in a world where the ground has had quite enough of gravity's incessant ordering around and has taken to the skies in the form of a thousand or so floating islands, on which humanity lives and does all the things to be expected from a steampunk society: fly around in airships, refuse to explore the benefits of electricity, wear just a bit too much brown leather, and so on. Unfortunately, nobody noticed the inherent difficulties in starting an industrial revolution when any coal mine more than a few hundred meters deep inevitably becomes a bottomless pit, so the fuel of choice for this burgeoning, fragmented society is the oil and grease harvested from the majestic sky whales. With these creatures fast-approaching extinction the race is on to find alternative energy sources, and while the solution probably resides in those ancient magical energy-producing MacGuffins that are scattered throughout the world, research into them is sadly forbidden thanks to the influence of a widespread influential religious group that might as well be called Antagonisticism. Consequentially it's up to you and a small underground research organisation to recover and investigate these artefacts, saving the developing world from the one fate worse than destruction: unreasonably high petrol prices.

But what of the 'half-baked' part of my dismissive statement? Well, when you introduce a tighter story focus into a game like this, you really have to step up the storytelling itself, and Windforge sort of flops in that regard. None of the characters you interact with are ever developed or even properly introduced. Who are these people? Why should I care about them? If I go and do enough quests will they stop recycling the same three or four dialogue interactions? Nobody is really introduced and they certainly aren't developed; the game just acts like you've always known them and never steps beyond there. I dare say that is true for the character whose actions I'm controlling, but I, the player, do not. It feels like a very old-fashioned RPG, one where nearly everybody is either a vendor or a quest-giver or an enemy to be murdered. Furthermore, in spite of my little dig in the previous paragraph, I'm twelve hours into the game and I've yet to be introduced to a main antagonist yet, which really dampens my enthusiasm. Why do you think Half-Life 2 had Doctor Breen?

Now, as any advocate of good game design will tell you, the best examples of story and gameplay are ones in which the two both contribute towards one another, in which the gameplay drives the story and the story subtly directs the gameplay. In Windforge, however, the story and gameplay are in a near-constant slap fight where at any given time they could totally contradict each other. Riddle me this, Windforge: why on earth should I care about the demise of the sky-whales and their related supply of oil when you have already demonstrated that every engine, machine and device in this steampunk universe runs on infinite supplies of S-grade fairy dust? Nothing consumes resources of any kind to operate. In a story centred around locating alternative energy sources, it seems extremely silly that you, the player, are immune to any of the actual troubles inherent in this crisis. What's that buzzword? The Bioshock one. You know, the one that every games journalist and their pet goldfish couldn't shut up about because it was the first new idea that had entered their sphere of knowledge in just under a decade. Anyway, it's all the more disappointing considering that I can't think of a good reason why this couldn't have been a gameplay mechanic. The sky-whales are in the game, and you can even kill them if you're heavily-armed enough, but there's no real reason to unless you're a spiteful tosser with a grudge against Greenpeace or you desperately need to fulfil a bulk order for five hundred blubber steaks. Being forced to hunt and harvest one in order to fuel the machines for your next big expedition would have complemented the story and added an extra layer of resource management to the gameplay that could have really made it stand out. But no, magical fairy dust diesel engines it is.

If you're one of those fortunate people to whom the words 'Terraria clone' mean absolutely nothing, either because you've recently emerged from a few years in an experimental cultural isolation tank or because you are an old person who has discovered this article while looking for Yahoo Mail, Windforge is another game in which a lone player character demonstrates the overwhelming destructive power of urban development. You obliterate more trees than a summer bushfire, dig unfeasibly large holes, extract every possible ounce of minerals from them, construct machines and monuments to your grandeur all while increasing your technological capabilities via the crafting system. You can tear through just about anything with your all-purpose steampunk jackhammer – including enemies, as I discovered with a sadistic chuckle of joy – which doesn't degrade or break, while crafting is done by acquiring the recipe, reading it over and going off on a shopping trip to find the necessary materials. It sounds like a logical system but actually getting your hands on recipes is something of a troublesome task. Supposing I want the recipe for a Metalworking Station, a device that would allow me to craft various machines and crucial airship parts, without which I would be severely limited in my crafting potential. I can run down to the local shops and see if they stock the recipe – unlikely, because in the grand tradition of general stores in every RPG ever, their shelves are essentially full of lint, spiders, and stuff you can just find lying around on the street – or I can go get a butcher's knife from the kitchen drawer, slaughter a live rat on my keyboard, offer the entrails as a sacrifice to the gods of random number generation and hope that I can get lucky while looting a bookshelf somewhere in one of the game's population centres.

Getting from place to place is difficult in a world where the daily commute involves traversing several miles of empty space with only the occasional updraft to support you, and this being a steampunk game that obviously means the introduction of airships. Now, this is the point where Windforge communicated to me that it's at least trying to lift itself above the bog-standard slew of Terraria clones, not just because it lets you fly around and gun down the local fauna but because its airships, like the terrain around them, are made entirely out of placeable items and blocks. Initially you might just see this as a nice little feature to appeal to your inner builder, allowing you to construct airships shaped like Concordes and cruise liners and male genitalia, but requiring you to maintain the various systems that keep them aloft and leaving the terrain's destructo-physics in really adds a whole new dimension to the gameplay that's just ripe for all kinds of organic chaotic action. You might clip a low-hanging rock while steaming along and burst your balloon, causing your ship to drop out of the sky and leaving you to wrestle with the controls in the vain hope that you'll land on something soft. You might sustain a stray artillery shot to the engine bay and be forced to leap astride an enemy vessel, brandishing a jackhammer and a bowie knife, while your crippled flagship goes up in flames. You might – as I did – get tangled up in a bandit's schooner, ram the resulting barely-buoyant mess of wood and tangled rigging into a cliff-side, and then be forced to tear through your own hull in order to get to your still-living opponents, painfully aware that every sudden movement is causing the wreckage of both your ships to slide a few inches further down the cliff towards a hole so deep that the people at the bottom still think fire is a pretty neat idea. All of this is made that much better by the inclusion of a grappling hook, which – unlike in a certain other game I covered recently – grants enormous freedom of movement once you learn to use it properly. 'Swashbuckling' is absolutely the right word.