Windrose – A Pirate’s Life for Me!
Posted on August 27, 2026 by Aywren
I do love a good pirate sailing game, preferably one with decent naval combat and some trading routes thrown in there. Windrose is a bit of a different type of pirate game in that it holds fast to the survival crafting adventure genre and puts a high seas spin on it.
Syn and I picked up Windrose pretty early into its EA release, and have played through all of the story content that this release provided. This took us up to level 15 and through three different biomes and boss fights. We finished this up back in June, and based on my Steam stats, I put about 87 hours into it so far.
Overall, we did enjoy it. It wasn’t without its bugs and troubles, however. Still, there was nothing in this EA that kept us from progressing, even if there was some grind to be had as we got deeper in.
The Good
There is a story baked into this game, which I found interesting. Nothing huge to write home about – there’s rarely a survival crafting game that has an earth-shattering story – but an effort has been made, and I appreciate it. There are even consistent NPCs and factions that I’ve begun to identify by name, which says a lot in terms of the story sticking.
Sadly, the story drops out after the third boss because that’s all there is. However, the fact that I’m curious to see where it goes is a good sign.
Progression in this game is much like your standard survival crafter. There are different biomes with different resources and foods to discover. Recipies unlock as you discover these things, allowing you to craft and plant more items.
However, there are some really nice quality-of-life elements to Windrose. My favorite is the one-click move from inventory button (which Palworld has since adopted, I noticed). Not only can you craft when the items are stored in your base chests instead of in your inventory (adopted from Enshrouded), but when you walk up to a chest, you click one button and all items in your inventory that have a match within that chest transfer into the chest.
You never have to open the chest to store like-items. This means you can set up a row of chests, and you just run by each one spamming the move-to button to empty your inventory of resources after you return home. I can’t tell you how much of a game changer that one feature is.
I was overjoyed to see that Palworld’s 1.0 release has this feature, too. Hopefully Enshrouded will borrow this - because while opening the chest and then pressing a button to do the same thing is nice, not having to open the chest at all is ten million times better!
I enjoyed the pirate theme elements, of course. Sailing is chill and your crew actually sings sea shanties if you tell them to!
I like the ships you build – and that you can own several ships as you upgrade to larger rigs. Depending on the type of ship you choose, you can build for more damage output and less defense, or more speed and carrying capability. It just depends on what you value most. You can switch ships around anytime you need, and upgrade their parts as individual ships.
Graphics are nice enough to look at, and the world is engaging enough. None of the biomes were absolutely breathtaking or anything, but island hopping is enjoyable and the ocean itself feels large and vast to explore. I just wish there was more reward for exploring the ocean – but I’ll get into that later. This is the positives section.
You can rank up with several factions by bringing trophies that drop through battle both on land and by ship. Each faction has perks of its own in terms of rewards you can purchase from them. Interestingly enough, on a shared server, all players earn faction from everyone’s turn-ins. I found this nice as it cut down on the amount of grinding we had to do, but I know some folks wish that faction was based on individuals rather than server.
The building system was very nice. Syn did most of the building this time around and she was able to create quite an appealing home base on the very first island we spawned. However, you can drop several bells down across the different islands and leave fast-travel claims as you like. I want to say you could have up to 10 claims per map(?) Might have been less. But whatever the number, it felt generous.
Fast-travel to any location is only a boat away. And you can summon your ship from any coast as long as it had the space to place a boat. If there wasn’t enough space for the big ship, you can always call your tiny skiff and fast travel from there.
The Meh
While I said we overall enjoyed the experience of the game, there are a few things about Windrose that weren’t as enjoyable. I won’t say any of these broke the game for me, but they are the things I wish would be improved.
As noted above, there’s not a lot of reason to want to explore the high seas yet. Sometimes you find floating barrels out and about or stuff left behind from other ships. But rarely were these rewards I felt like going off-course to grab.
There could be so many things out in the ocean to spark curiosity, but most of the time, I’m just out there sailing to avoid enemy fleets. This is because I really didn’t enjoy ship battle all that much. It felt janky at times – so many of my shots missed enemy ships when I felt they should have connected. And then there’s the circling and circling and circling and circling to get back to a point to shoot.
The mid-sized Blackbeard brig was awful for visibility for front canons. I simply could not see past the over-sized figurehead. This was sad because it was a fun ship aside from that. Once I upgraded to the frigate, it got a better, but the brig just ignited so much frustration that I avoided battle as much as I could.
Speaking of battle, we found out late into the game that in Windrose, it’s not your level, but the level of your gear that matters most in terms of how much damage you do both to enemies on land and sea. So, if your weapon or armor (or ships weapons/armor) are under the level of the enemy you’re fighting, you do significantly less damage and take more damage. It doesn’t matter if you and your ship are a higher level.
I’m not sure if the game ever spelled that out, but it makes a huge difference, and is just one annoyance that kept coming back to bite us because we didn’t realize this.
Also, talking about leveling, it was annoying that you didn’t earn a talent point each time you leveled. It’s not like we were swimming in talent points to use as I could hardly create a build from what I had by the time we were level 15. It became somewhat disappointing when you dinged a level only to get no reward at all for it – especially since level didn’t matter as much as the level of gear.
As for the specifics of battle, it’s nice that there are a variety of weapons to choose from. However, I put the on-land battle into the meh section because I often found it more frustrating than it needed to be. It felt overtuned in difficulty – our private server had it tuned down and it was still sometimes painful.
I also didn’t enjoy melee all that much in Windrose, which is odd because melee is usually my jam and the fact that there’s a rapier option should have sucked me right in. I found it somewhat clunky, with the enemy stunning me far more than should have been, and not all of my blows landing even when I was point-blank and should have hit. That might have been due to the level of the gear vs. the level of the enemy, but still, it just didn’t feel good.
Instead, I more often than not opted for my musket as main ranged weapon. This was also annoying because bullets are crafted and gobble up resources needed for other things. Not to mention carrying extra ammo took precious inventory slots. I was constantly running out of ammo – either the bullet or the gunpowder (I kept reserves on my ships). The better the bullet type, the more accurate it is apparently… which is… yeah. Annoying. Especially when I know a shot should have landed and it didn’t.
On top of that, being ranged was wonky due to hit boxes. Syn would rush ahead of me, being the tankier build, but trying to follow up as ranged almost always got shots blocked due to her character’s hit box – at no fault of hers or mine. And if it wasn’t her character, it was sometimes her pig pet that blocked me. It didn’t matter how carefully I lined up head-shots, so many were missed because I saw a perfect opening but the game registered another character in front of me.
And finally, resource grind. It’s fine to have to go back and mine more ore or chop more trees. But in Windrose, these resources take real life time to respawn. I mean hours worth of time – I think 6 hours was what I heard. Considering the number of resources you need, this was a true pain point, especially in mid-game where it just didn’t feel like there were enough islands with the right kind of trees to do what you needed to do when building ships for more than one player.
We’d often leave the server running for hours in the background while not logged in just to allow resources time to respawn. And then we’d go out and grind to gather them all to start the cycle again.
The final nit-pick I have relates to the factions and material turn-ins. I like having different factions to work up. However, there are so many drops in this game, and one type might go to one faction, another type another faction. Not to mention, faction bases are scattered around the world on tiny islands all their own. Hopping around and remembering where one or the other was became time-consuming the more factions we unlocked. I wish there was a more central hub for turn-ins, like there are faction merchants in Tortuga.
So, there are absolutely things that need tweaking. Still, it didn’t stop us from finishing up the story content, and looking forward to the new stuff.
The Steam page has already teased the next big content release, the Ashlands. From the bulleted list at the bottom of the official post, it does seem like they’re thinking through some of the issues I’ve had with the EA so far.
Though the teaser is very short, and I’m not sure if I’m terribly excited by a dark biome, I’m interested to see where this will lead. From what I heard, we’ll see sometime this fall (?)
Have you tried Windrose? If so, what did you think?