Review

Windrose review

A fantastic seafaring adventure best shared with friends!

Introduction

It all started in January 2026, when the developers from a small indie studio in Uzbekistan dropped a demo out of nowhere — a co-op (!!!) pirate action survival game with naval battles in the spirit of Black Flag. I’ll admit, I was charmed! Straight onto the wishlist it went! Naturally, my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to find out a little more about the developers. After a fairly short (and not particularly difficult) investigation, it turned out that most of the team is from Russia, and the person at the helm spent 11 years at the rather well-known Lesta Studio. Did that information affect my opinion of the game? Absolutely! I was happy to see experienced people in charge who know how to steer development in the right direction, and that the game might have a long and eventful life ahead of it :-)

Fast-forward to mid-April 2026, when Windrose entered Early Access and was immediately bought for both me and my wife. In this post, I’ll try not to frame things as what the developers got right or wrong. Instead, I’ll share my hopefully objective opinion on different aspects of the game. Let’s go!

Combat

Lots of people who’ve played it compare the combat to soulslikes. I have a little experience myself (around 1,000–1,500 hours across FromSoftware games), so I do have some expertise here, and I’d like to say: please stop calling every game with stamina a soulslike. Please! That’s not how this works!

Your character doesn’t feel too stiff, but I wouldn’t call the combat controls particularly responsive either. Maybe the problem is the whole “lock onto a target and fight in that direction” system — it works terribly. On keyboard and mouse, it’s downright painful. The scariest thing that can happen to you is a mob starting to move sideways. That’s it. You’re screwed. Landing a hit becomes impossible. It’s especially noticeable with a rapier. But playing without target lock is practically a death sentence. Maybe a two-handed weapon could work if you just swing it around in every direction. Except that brings up another problem — a severe stamina shortage. And God forbid you happen to pick up the “comfort” buff at camp/on your ship!

The amount of damage you take is enormous! Which brings us to a major problem — having no idea how the numbers in this game work. Neither defence nor damage. More on that below. You’re forced to chip away at mobs using the famous “hit-hit-retreat” strategy. Except you’re often the one taking it, and in a rather more sexual sense than intended.

Dodging is here, and it’s your main way of avoiding damage. Blocking and parrying are available too, but both work very strangely. Could be the hitboxes, could be the animations. I only managed to parry reliably with a rapier. Couldn’t get the hang of it with anything else :-(

Stance, aka poise, aka those little “shields,” is a strange thing — or maybe it just doesn’t work as intended yet. Breaking it takes a lot of effort, and your reward is 1–2 free hits. Weird mechanic. Only really works well on bosses. Wasn’t a fan, basically.

Weapons

This one’s a mixed bag. I tried running around with all (or almost all) weapon types. Sabres, two-handed swords, maces, and fish.

Fish?! Fish! I confess: I smacked a crocodile in the face with a fish and giggled while doing it. That happened.

Of the melee weapons, I ended up spending the most time with a rapier. Nice moveset, a lovely huge parry window, good reach. The downside — one button press gives you a two-hit combo, and there’s no way to cancel the animation. That really hurts! I died a ridiculous number of times because of it! Oh, and its poise damage is pathetic. I didn’t get two-handed weapons at all. I got the distinct impression that their actual DPS was much lower than one-handed weapons. Add the slow wind-ups and the inability to cancel attack animations… Yeah, into the chest they went.

I only see firearms as a secondary option. The amount of gunpowder and ammo you can carry is strictly limited, and you can’t restock “on the go.” Either fill your ship’s hold with supplies or keep teleporting home. Add VERY long reloads, and you’ve got something good for opening a fight. But completely impractical once you’re in the thick of it. So I spent ages running around with a pistol that simply applies a debuff. Shoot the bad guy, and now your toothpick does more damage to him.

Progression

Stats first — hard-capping all attributes at 20 is a very questionable decision. In practice, there’s no point raising anything except Vitality above 20 — you’re just wasting points. In the current “late game,” you dump everything into Vitality and eat food that gives +20 to the stat you need = profit.

Now for the passives — they’re frankly weird and push you towards simply stacking HP and stamina. Everything else doesn’t matter all that much. Maybe I’m spoiled, but I’ve never liked the whole “+3% piercing damage” concept. The safest choice ends up being to make yourself nice and beefy with plenty of stamina, so you can take lots of hits and do very little dying.

And finally: you don’t get XP for killing mobs or boarding ships. The only ways to level up are “fetch this, bring that, go screw yourself, stop bothering me” quests and discovering points of interest on the islands. Maybe things will improve closer to release, when there are far more quests. Maybe the devs will come up with additional ways to earn XP. But my friends and I got a bit worn down by the tedium.

Upgrading weapons and armour

It’s painful, confusing, and completely opaque:

• How does attack work?
• What do those damage numbers on your weapon mean?
• How does defence work?
• What do you actually get from upgrading weapons and armour?

Not a damn clue. Unless you go digging through Reddit, YouTube, the Steam community, and various guides, good luck figuring any of it out. Meanwhile, a reminder: when you level your stats and pick passives, you’re offered completely abstract things like “+3/6/9% piercing damage.” What really got me raging was arriving in a new biome, feeling like hot stuff. You’ve just cleared the previous one, kicked the boss’s arse, sailed around, and sunk loads of baddies. You’re happy and feeling very, very powerful! You sail to a new island, all fired up and excited, jump ashore, and the very first mobs you meet immediately start humiliating you. They’re only 1–2 levels above you. But you barely scratch them, while they hand you enough of a beating for two people in just 3 hits! The real problem is that you need resources from this biome to upgrade your weapons and armour and build a new ship. And there’s only one way forward — suffering!

Economy

There’s a lot of work to be done here. Everything needs balancing, because it just doesn’t work. You might have some money troubles before the second biome, but after that, you feel like the richest bastard in the Caribbean! You have so much money and absolutely nowhere to spend it. Even buying resources from vendors, you’re constantly sitting on thousands and tens of thousands of coins. Once you start farming the final biome — forget about it.

Reputation system

It all seems straightforward — pirates and pirate ships drop insignias of different qualities. You hand each insignia to a vendor for a certain amount of reputation. Higher quality means more reputation. As your reputation grows, vendors sell you various goods, blueprints, and upgrades. Including “recipes” for new ships and gear. The trouble is, insignias drop from every enemy ship you sink. Very quickly, you have so damn many that you stop picking them up. Because your reputation is already maxed out with everyone, and I never found another use for them.

Grinding

It’s a survival game, so yes, there’s grinding. Plenty of it. It’s not unbearably tedious, but I wouldn’t call it enjoyable either. Take the boar genocide (sorry!) in the starting areas. You need an enormous number of hides for absolutely everything, so you’ll be slaughtering those adorable little oinkers on an industrial scale! Some resources are difficult and tedious to gather. Others pile up in such ridiculous quantities that you have nowhere to put them. Overall, though — I’ve seen much worse :-)

Ships

I forgave the game every flaw in its land combat and economy, all the grinding, for the chance to race across the waves aboard my lovely ship, with the crew singing as the setting sun turns the seascape into living gold! You spin the wheel, spot some cargo-carrying scoundrels on the horizon, and boldly steer towards them… An incredible feeling! We spent hours just causing absolute mayhem at sea :-) The ship controls and naval battles in general bring on a huge wave of nostalgia for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. It’s all familiar, we’ve seen it before, the formula works, and we love this stuff! At the same time, every available ship handles and feels completely different. There are 3 ship models in total, by the way.

• Ketch — a small, nippy starter ship. Great for exploring the early areas. Pretty mediocre firepower, but that speed? Hats off!
• Brigantine — the middle ground. One variant can carry heavy cannons (which I fitted immediately :) ). Still handles pretty well, too.
• Frigate — now this is something else! It’s huge, it’s powerful, it’s tough! You can slap on the most powerful cannons (yep, did that straight away!). Manoeuvrability, however, is nonexistent :-)

Each model also has 3 variants that affect its core stats — a little faster with more powerful cannons, or more cargo space, a little slower, and a ton of HP.

You can fit various upgrades to your ships:

• Armour — increases hull toughness, meaning it reduces the damage your ship takes. Probably. It’s not explained. Same situation as character gear. All that’s clear is that the more you upgrade it, the longer you survive.
• Cannons — come in different sizes, with different firepower and passive effects. The effects are all fairly clear and fit logically into the gameplay.
• Boarding crew — upgrading increases your crew’s “toughness.” How much damage they can take/deal during boarding.

And since we’re talking about boarding — that’s a bit of a fly in the barrel of rum. You’re stuck on a narrow deck, chipping away at damage-sponge mobs and constantly missing because they have the audacity to slowly strafe sideways, and your character hasn’t learned how to hit them when they do that. On top of everything else, you need to watch your surroundings very carefully, because your brave crew can die very quickly, leaving even more enemies piling onto you from every direction. The end result — the absolute worst combat experience! Not even the boars at the start or the crocodiles at the end beat me up as badly as boarding fights did!

A special thank you for the fast-travel system. Without it, things would be painfully tedious; with it, they’re pretty convenient. You get more than enough travel points. You can jump between NPC camps too. Basically, designed with actual people in mind :-)

Graphics — honestly, I liked them! Not because they’re incredibly realistic, but because they’re really easy on the eyes! An interesting style, beautiful scenery, stylish outfits, detailed ships — lovely stuff all around! I played on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and an RTX 5070 Ti at 2K resolution. Frame generation and DLSS were enabled. FPS was fine, a steady 60+ everywhere, and I didn’t notice any horrible blur. But I’m hardly a graphics connoisseur, honestly, so mine isn’t the most reliable opinion here.

I liked the music. It fits the different situations really well, though I’d like a bit more variety in the tracks.

Verdict

For a small indie studio and a project that’s only just entered Early Access — absolutely wonderful! The naval battles save the whole thing; they’re brilliantly done! I really hope the game keeps growing and getting regular updates, and that the developers listen to their community. They’ve already sold 2,000,000 copies, after all!

— X post · Open post

P.S. We played in a group of 3–4, hoovered up all the available content, and ended up with 60+ hours. Took our time, died a lot, did plenty of grinding, tested different builds, and spent a lot of time sailing :-)

Action RPGSurvivalMultiplayer