Windforge - Snowed In Studios - PC (2014)

Come to Windforge they said. Enjoy the free roaming 2D RPG experience they said. Build an airship, craft weapons, armour and flourish in a procedurally generated steampunk inspired world. They said. And, to be fair, Snowed In Studios delivered on their promises, just not very well.

Gameplay wise, this has all the moving parts that you’d expect from a title like this. If you’ve played Terraria before you’ll know what to expect (and if you haven’t go play it!). It differs slightly in that you control a character who finds himself on board a floating house like object with the unenvious task of building an engine, propellers and repairing the burst balloon hanging on top of your craft. Again, like Terraria, you leave the safety of your “home” to mine the necessary materials and bring them back to craft what you need for your aircraft. Your pickaxe is replaced with a drill, your sword replaced with a gun but other than that it’s the same. It is a mechanic that can become quite addictive, if done right. The thought of grabbing that one last block of iron to craft a suit of solid, glorious armour left a lot of players with that “10 more minutes” feeling in Terraria. It’s not present here, and really that’s all about its delivery.

Windforge’s options menu is horrendous. Honestly, horrendous. Empire Earth, released in 2001, has more options. That’s a 13 year old game. 13 years! All you have in Windforge is to set the resolution and fullscreen or no fullscreen. No V-Sync, no graphical fidelity options, no AA, and my biggest bugbear no rebindable key settings! I’ve seen better options on iOS games and for a PC game in 2014 it’s just not good enough at all. Which leads me on nicely to its framerate issues. If there’s even the slightest bit more going on the screen at any one time the framerate will nose-dive to an almost unplayable rate. Again, unforgiveable in 2014 for a 2D game.

I’d be able to possibly look past this if the game was aesthetically pleasing, it has its own style, which isn’t terrible. However, I get the feeling that it was done by two artists. It’s half cartoon, half realistic and doesn’t meld well together. The reason why Terraria worked so well with its mining was that it was strict with its scale. Your character is 3 blocks high, you can only move into a space that is 3 blocks high. With Windforge, that just simply isn’t the case. Your character will clip through the world, and its feedback system is so bad you won’t be able to tell if you’ve mined out a block or if it’s on the ground waiting to be picked up. Whereas mining in Terraria is a regimented, almost therapeutic experience, Windforge had me chipping away blocks like an Unreal Tournament Pro trapped in a glass box looking for a way out, which is a bit like the way the AI acts.

I’m convinced the AI pathing is completely random. One playthrough an enemy will run from wall to wall trying to dodge my bullets and jumping at random intervals, on the next, they’ll be ruthless perfectly aiming buggers. I really wouldn’t mind ruthless slayers as long as they stay that way all the time, you don’t know what’s a real threat and what’s cannon fodder, and for the game to have enemies you can believe in, you need this! Not to mention how frustrating it is when your bullet flys straight through an enemy causing no damage? It drags you kicking and screaming out of its immersion. For example, I managed to clear the King’s room of guards from the main city by shooting them from a distance, tried to smack a scholar with a wrench and he took me to school in a matter of seconds. That’s not right at all, the guard should be having me for his breakfast and the scholar cowl in terror. Keep in mind though, that Windforge will kill you in the most remorseless of ways. Mine too deep into a cave and you’ll mine yourself out of the floating sky island, and straight to your death. Whack a non-descript barrel with your wrench. BOOM. Dead.

Save, save often. As when you die, do you go back to your ship or most recent position? No, no you don’t. You have to load the save again. Didn’t save? New game for you then, enjoy the tutorial. Again, another flaw of its design philosophy. Fine for certain games, not for an RPG focused on building.

It is frustrating to come across a game with the concept of Windforge. I love steampunk inspired titles of which this is one. I loved Terraria, I was looking forward to playing this game and that’s the truth. There’s a good, workable concept. Its mechanics have been proven to work in many titles. I’d love to be able to say go out and buy this, but it’s filled with so many bugs and its lack of polish is detrimental to its experience. I really hope that the developer is committed to resolving some of these issues but a lot of them run into the way the game was constructed and will not be able to be fixed in its current form. It’s available for £11.99 at time of writing, which is the price of the Early Access release of Starbound, who have one of the developers of Terraria on board, for comparison.  So, with baited breath I sit waiting, waiting for that original and well-constructed Steampunk game to come along. Any day now, right?

Review written and published on Universal Gaming