I Really... REALLY think this game needs a re-balance to help level things out. With that said i still really enjoy the game but i can also handle a lot more BS then most people when it comes to games. the re-balance could help new provinces with security because when you start a new one YOURSELF through random mission it starts with 0% security which is fine because its new. then I got it up to size 6 from grinding missions in the area for it to still give me no mission to build a cannon tower to increase my security oh i did get a light house though, 3 TIMES. I could be wrong but im not sure if there is supplies to allow you to place one without a mission like in the old Windward game but with 0% security you are constantly FKed from pirates and they never go away and once you finish them off then they do a raid on your towns which for some reason the fleet of pirates ship that you kept taking out towns wasn't a raid just a hoard passing by i guess, maybe if they could add a cool down between attacks so you can atleast enjoy the game but with the 30 min pirate raid that had 60 ships in it, back to back i just left. I was attack so much that i just left the province to go upgrade somewhere else which was a bad idea because everyone already had 2 levels up from the starter ship above the one you start with so i thought i would be smart and go to the 4th one from the starter ship where you would need a size 8 town to buy. but once i did I came back to my province where everyone had the same ship as the one i bought including the pirates and random passing ships. I thought I was getting FKed before but now i can even fight more than 2 at a time hell even 1 kicks my ass but the have the attack power to render the complete area useless now> i upgraded everything on my ship had over 200% attack, about 200% hull (health), and 150% armor but yet the pirates had, from some reasons double mortars and volleys. the mortars would destory my armor completely on both sides while take about 25% of my health (just from 1 hit not both) while the volley would pen 50% of my armor and do about 40% to my hull. what im saying is at this low level area that im building up there should be this kind of force attacking it. I would show screen shot but 1 i cant because it wont let me and 2 even if i could i probably would get in trouble for releasing Porn on a game review for as much as the pirates are Fking me.

Kind of OK game but damn the pirates are just annoying. It's like that one mosquito at 2 AM in your bedroom. Doesn't do much but FOR SOME REASON, if there is a pirate ship ANYWHERE on your screen, well, you better go kill it or wait for a horde of friendly incompetent NPC ships to take it down. And here, have some repetitive anti-chill combat music while you are locked out of skill trees, town interfaces and what-not. Pirate dead? Good! Now wait another 10 seconds while we let the music fade until you can resume your activity. Just hurry up because another pirate ship is entering your screen in 5... 4... 3...

bad joke of a game. hint says to put equipment items into harbor to put them on the new war sloop ship. just as i do that, a pirate approaches the harbor and i cant interact with it anymore, having no items equipped on the sloop. i keep dying repeatedly because i cant do anything. pirates capture the harbor and the ship i just spend 2 hours on farming just vanished. idiotic game design. refunded.

Edit: After writing a detailed review Aren revoked the backer key I paid for forcing me to seek a refund through PayPal, and banned me from the community. Response to the dev: You're half right - PayPal won't let you dispute a transaction over 180 days. PayPal issued a credit to keep me as a customer. You never gave me a refund. I was made whole after contacting PayPal. By the way, editing a review resets the review date. I absolutely did not re-purchase your game. You could hover over the review star in the top-right to see that rather than rely on fabrications and insults. It seems your goal was to silence this review from the get go and that's sad. My goal is for this review to be informative, not to devolve into a mud-slinging contest. Be better. --- I'm a long-time fan of Windward and a backer for Windward Horizon, playtesting over 300 hours to find bugs and provide feedback. Horizon expands upon the original with a world map, a rudimentary economy, a handful of banal story quests and changes to the equipment, stats and ships. While often a step forward in some ways, most of the changes suffer from caveats and drawbacks which make them feel like tradeoffs. The charm of the previous title has been lost. The world map of Windward is replaced with one that is procedurally generated from satellite images of real islands. You can not customize the faction perks, stat bonuses, location, or world map without the use of mods which prevent you from playing with that save on non-modded servers. All ships on the world map use the same icon regardless of ship size. NPCs follow the shortest route on the map, optimizing for the same 2 or 3 best deals at the time. They will eventually stack into miles-long convoys hauling goods. While traveling the world map, a dialogue window may appear to alert you that a pirate has spawned to attack you, clearing your destination in the process. The map itself has no currents or weather. Biomes are indicated by the color of the terrain without a legend it is difficult to tell whether the color you're looking at represents "Seattle", "Moderate", or "Autumn". Natural resources are hidden unless you have a province quest, then they are portrayed as question marks requiring you to stop and inspect each one. On a server you may spend much of your time traveling the world map. Single-player does allow you to fast-forward, at least. To quote the developer, he "wants you to spend as little time on the world map as possible". This change is probably one of the most baffling to me. The story is a net negative. Your identity is "captain", and thats it. Most factions have two or three faction leaders which have about as much depth as the AI prompts used to generate them. A select few of these faction leaders are what the dev refers to as "waifus". They are the characters with the most dialogue and interactions. They are not any better written than the rest of the cast. Most of the storylines are filled with tropes and gags, including a fart joke. Some of these interactions are required in order to unlock access to hidden factions. One of the hidden factions has the most powerful and unique talent in the game. The power of this ability is tied to your reputation with this faction. This faction leader is the dev's favorite waifu. None of the other "public" factions enjoy the volley variants they had in the original Windward, leaving all the flavor in one place. There are now just 30 levels with 3 specializations. Every specialization must also deal damage, a healing focused build is non-viable. Further complicating the support role is the necessity to first have the required equipment to be able to apply buffs, and then you must also use your one and only healing ability to apply the buffs. Adding insult to injury is the fact that other specializations have the most relevant buffs built in or can access them through equipment as well. Difficulty is determined by a scaling system. This is entirely invisible to you. One could sail to a lower level region in Windward, it is impossible to do so here. Combat devolves into using all your abilities on your opponent as soon as possible. Combat is entirely an arcade experience with no time for positioning or strategy. Allies grow weaker as the challenge rating increases. The existence of sci-fi style energy shields (armor) and one-shot protection highlight just how skewed combat can be. Completing a quest earns you reputation with that faction and increases their influence. In Windward, you'd retake a region from pirates or an opposing faction. In Horizon, you further your faction's goals and increase their political pressure. This has the tacit acknowledgement that any quest completed for a rival faction is in opposition to the controlling faction. On an official or shared server you may find yourself unwelcome in a province if your faction is not aligned. Traders influence political pressure, so even in single-player you must defend it from elements that you have zero control over. Viewing pressure requires you to enter a command in chat, while influence is only visible when inside a province and docked in a town. Expect to spend hours dragging items across 15+ inventory slots to see if it modifies your stats in a favorable way and do it all over again as you shuffle items around. The lack of an overall character summary further obfuscates aspects of your build. First mates and captains provide additional skills. Some skills are clearly best-in-class, while others are relegated to the bin or don't work in some situations (such as against the game's one boss). Swapping these skills is an expensive and cumbersome process, so be prepared to bring two or more captains to a fight if you want to have multiple builds or utility. Items themselves fall within a group of six or seven archetypes with pre-defined ranges. There are no sets or exotics. The top item tier can actually underperform lower item tiers due to the way items level up. Boss fights are a mess with multiple ships. AI allies will deplete their respawn tokens and your patience as they pile up and get themselves and you killed. If the boss drifts off the edge of the map they will despawn. NPCs will happily remind you of this. Unless its changed, friendly fire is enabled by default on unofficial servers. The first player on the server hosts the world map while the first player in a region hosts it for all others. If a host is distant from you then you'll have to get used to ships rubberbanding on the map and in regions. The game seems to make use of TCP rather than the industry-standard UDP leading to unreliable network performance. The economy is dominated by omniscient NPC traders. You must dock in town and type out questions to get answers about goods and prices which may or may not be honest. Neat in concept, but frustrating in practice. Growing a province is locked behind a quest with many requirements before it can even generate. Founding a province is largely useless as domination quests provide access to the highest tier of goods in far greater supply and with enough money to actually buy your old equipment at full value without requiring you to invest hours of your time micromanaging one or more provinces. There are bugs which have been reported multiple times, acknowledged, and left unfixed: - Whenever too many sounds play at once all sounds will cease - The combat music can become stuck playing indefinitely - Structures don't actually remove their hitbox once destroyed leaving an invisible obstacle which blocks shots and mortars - It is painfully easy to duplicate items and ships and push those saves to the cloud - You can boost prosperity for next to nothing by buying a ship and selling it back If you're interested in some of the ideas Windward Horizon attempts to pull off, I recommend Starsector.

This game is a pile of garbage, with tons of bugs. Totally feel like a waste of money for buying it. Advise everyone not to buy it, only get anger and nothing else.

Visually, this game is stunning. Sailing feels smooth. The world is vibrant. The atmosphere is genuinely fun to be in, and early gameplay especially is engaging. When combat clicks, it really clicks. It has that fast, arcadey feel reminiscent of Sid Meier's Pirates! and that’s not just nostalgia talking. It’s a great direction for a naval game: quick, punchy combat instead of bogged-down turn-based nonsense. But then... the weirdness sets in. It’s a game that could’ve nailed the genre been the modern Pirates! we all wanted—but instead, it gets weirdly self-defeating in its design choices. - Want to note, that even though it's suggested that the game is built "with coop in mind" the game is in fact heavily built around multiplayer as a focus- which is why a lot of the systems and design choices are shallow, lacking or bad. Eg. XvX. Thus, these are unlikely to be changed/fixed or built upon.

The Game Feels Great... Until It Doesn’t

None of the issues are deal-breakers in isolation. But they stack.

• The lack of failure states.
• Unbalanced XvX combat.
• An economy that collapses under its own systems.

It creates a spiral where things that feel solid at first begin to unspool and start undermining each other. There are other things that I see others mention that I don't think are a massive issue, like no Pause feature- there's no failure states, it doesn't need one. Pirates constantly interrupting the player- this was more of an issue early game, that solved itself later, I'm unsure why.

Item System: A Beautiful Mess

There’s a Diablo-style equipment system for your ship, and I love that idea. You can equip different sails, cannons, crew, captains, etc.—each with randomised stats. Hull, Armour, Accuracy, Diplomacy, Repair, Mobility... it’s all in there. But it’s also where I feel half the game’s balance goes to die. The scaling feels off. Really off, and I think it's partly due to this system and the level scaling. Ships sometimes randomly one-shot you, even if you’re built tanky and mobile. Meanwhile, if you invest in survivability (Repair/Armor/Diplomacy/Mobility like I have), your damage suffers so much that you can’t actually win fights. You become a tanky pushover. This is due to the game's inherent items "Kiss-Curse" design, where if you take X stats, you are sacrificing stats elsewhere, so you can't have Damage and survivability. Sure, you could swap out builds, run a damage-first cannon/captain combo for some fights and mobility for others but let’s be honest: that isn’t fun. It’s busywork. The result is that the system becomes a tug-of-war with no real payoff. The only viable build? Probably just max damage and hope for the best. This is made worse by the level scaling. If you buy a new ship, all the enemies upgrade ships. If you level- the enemies level, so it feels bad and you feel pigeon holed.

Province Combat Mode: What Were They Thinking?

The province siege mode (XvX combat) is the most baffling design in the game. You’re locked into it for 10+ minutes. Always. Doesn’t matter how powerful you are. Capture every point instantly? Kill the entire enemy fleet three times over? Too bad. You’re here for at least 10 minutes, champ. Only after that timer do respawn limits activate. Then it’s 15 lives per side or 60 if you’re in a bigger ship. Why? No clue. There’s no player agency here. Just a chore. Why isn’t this mode based on lives from the start? I don't think the mode is inherently bad, it's the fact you are stuck inside of it for 10 minutes regardless of what you do. Which means you can quite literally go AFK for 10 minutes- unironically.

Failure States: Missing in Action

There are none. No, seriously:

• Die in combat? Respawn, lose nothing.
• Crew upkeep? Doesn’t exist.
• Provinces starving? They just... wait patiently.

Everything just stalls. There’s no cost to failure, so there’s no pressure. Not even a hardcore mode. You’re never forced to respond to crisis. The world just kind of... keeps going. Which feeds into the economy problem.

The Economy: Cool Concept, Poor Execution

At first glance, the economy is really impressive. Resources move. Provinces produce and consume. When one stops producing, another suffers. It feels dynamic. It fooled me at first—in a good way. But over time, you realize:

• Provinces don’t produce enough to meet their own needs.
• Food shortages are constant. Beverages vanish instantly.
• Growth never reverses. If a province grows, it never shrinks.

So instead of a living economy, you get a one-way resource black hole. Provinces keep growing and demanding more, but there’s no correction mechanism. It’s not that the economy is bad—it’s that there are no counterweights.

Province Management: Weirdly Limiting

When you found a province, it feels like you should own it but you don’t, not really. You can build a workshop but you don't own the resources it produces- it's not Mount & Blade, just a choice. You also can collect taxes but those taxes are tiny and only paid out when you physically visit the settlement. They’re more symbolic than impactful. It feels less about running your own settlement and more about trying to clean up the mess made by AI-generated chaos. You also can't create your own faction, you create like a "mini faction" within a pre-existing faction, so you wont see ships sailing your flags, or your own settlements giving you that "I own this shit" vibe. Existing provinces? You can’t touch them. You can’t assign or replace their workshops. You can’t guide their development. So when your world seed ends up with four Clothiers and barely any food production, there’s nothing to do but shrug and work around it. Why can’t I reshape a dysfunctional province? Why can’t I spend gold or use influence to fix its purpose? I like and have played Patrician, and Port Royale- the fact that I can't buy and run my own Workshops in a game that revolves around you shaping and profitting off of an economy just misses. There’s so much potential here but no real agency. It’s a sandbox you’re stuck reacting to, not one you can actually shape.

Final Thoughts

There’s definitely more, there is more, but this is what stuck with me most. This game wants to be brilliant. And it gets so close. The pieces are all here: exploration, dynamic trade, RPG-like gear, active combat. But the systems don’t mesh. They pull in different directions. And where there should be weight and consequence, there’s nothing. I don’t hate it. Far from it. I’ve sunk quite a few hours into it. And I get it, it’s indie. I don’t know the size of the team, and even if it’s a solo dev, what’s here is respectable. But it’s like brushing against the arsehair of gold. You can see what it could be. It just misses on enough fronts that I can’t recommend it, not for someone looking for a true evolution of Sid Meier’s Pirates!, or for someone hoping for an improvement on that legacy. It’s close. Frustratingly close. But not quite.

Updated review after ~36 hours of playtime. Original review below, created at 5.3 hours. As promised, I came back to give this game a updated review—and after a few small patches and sitting at 36.2 hours now, I’ve got more to say. The dev has pushed out some updates, mostly bug fixes and “balancing” tweaks, but let’s be real: it all feels like slapping a damn bandaid over a gaping wound. Players complained about scaling? Now you can tweak world settings. Players hated the XP penalty from upgrading ships? That’s adjustable too. Instead of actual balancing, it feels like the dev threw up his hands and said “screw it, let the players either break the game or Skyrim-easy-mode it.” (Yes dev, I saw the description.) One update buffed the repair skill (not water barrel), and holy shit, what the hell was that buff? I can drop fog on myself, stop moving, hit repair, and fully heal in a few seconds. The fog’s still there after I’ve fully healed. It’s busted as hell. And if I can do it, so can the AI. I don’t even wanna imagine how broken that is in PvP. Meanwhile, my water barrel—which has 90% of my talent points dumped into it—feels like I'm slapping a wet napkin on my ship. Strategically healing over time gets outclassed by just yeeting fog and repairing everything while the AI does the same. Combat is still trash. Skills hit way harder than cannons, and I still routinely get deleted down to 30-40% HP by a single enemy skill. When you’re up against 4–5 enemies? Don’t even bother—there’s no time to react. No time to fog, no time to think, just dead. Pirate Kings and Captains? Absolute bullshit. You do barely any damage, they pop you down to a sliver of health, then full-heal like they’re playing a different game. Your only hope is to let your AI buddies swarm them while you plink away from the edge of the screen, hoping not to get aggro’d. It’s miserable. Also, I found the most broken and overly busted skill ever seen in this game. My first mate or captain, don't remember who, but one of them gives my volley fire skill an insane 200% penetration, 100% crit chance, and 100% crit damage which allows me to one shot most ships I come across. And those that aren't one shot, I cannot even imagine what it's like to fight them normally. Story-wise? I gave up trying. Dialogue is endless and feels meaningless. I started skipping everything. Only thing I do remember is a dude trying to find his cat... and then banging a girl you were helping. No joke. Here’s what the game hits you with: *You hear noises and murmured whispers coming from behind Alvana's door as you get near it. Moments after your knock, the door cracks open to reveal Alvana with disheveled hair peeking through.* Captain? Now is not a good time. *Before you can reply, you hear Rowdy's gruff voice calling out for her. Seeing your expression, she grins and shrugs.* Sorry. Rowdy and I just... clicked. No hard feeling Vinylsdarkside. *She shuts the door on you, leaving you standing there and wondering how this happened. Oh well. She wasn't that interesting anyway. All those unresolved daddy issues? Who needs to deal with that? You're better off. Yeah, this is for the best.* Farewell. Bro. What the fuck is this cope or cuck nonsense? I’ve completed every character’s story (check my achievements), but I’m still locked out of some ships. One ship requires 8 steel, 8 silk, and 12 exceptional quality lumber (25% chance drop from Mahogany btw). But guess what? I don’t have enough storage to even hand over the items to unlock it, so I’m forced to buy another ship—just for storage—so I can unlock a different ship. And I don’t even know if that ship will be better. Let me hand in quest cargo in batches or, better yet, give us a damn cargo vault like people have been asking for. Right now it’s either clog your inventory or throw stuff overboard. It’s dumb. Oh, and trading? Still cheese. I figured it out: buy resources, craft better quality goods, and just sell them back to the same province. Boom, free 100–200g profit per item. Or sail to another province for 200–400g profit... but why bother? That’s how I got to 1.4M gold. And that’s with me staying at tier 3 ships because combat scales with your ship and I didn’t wanna risk making things worse. I’ll be real, the only reason I’ve dumped this many hours into the game is because I stumbled on the player province loop. You grab a "Settle a Province" quest, find a spot with at least 3 resources—or just one really solid one like Mahogany—and build up as many towns as you can. Dump town supplies on them every 12 minutes, and boom, you’re swimming in cash from crafting high-end goods while passively pulling in decent XP from quests. I still don’t recommend this game. Balancing is a joke – Instead of fixing core issues, the dev just made everything adjustable, letting players break or dumb down their own experience. Combat is still busted – Skills are overpowered, healing is either useless or absurdly OP, and enemy captains are straight-up unfun to fight. Story is pointless – Wall of dialogue with no weight or purpose, and some of it is just plain weird or immersion-breaking. Ship progression is tedious – You need absurd materials and storage just to unlock ships, sometimes requiring you to buy ships you don’t even want. Cargo and trading are clunky – No cargo vault, inventory management is a chore, and trading is exploitable cheese with no real challenge or depth. Multiplayer is at least easy to access – One-click from the menu. Probably the only feature that doesn’t suck. Still not worth recommending – Game’s core systems just aren’t fun or rewarding, and that hasn’t changed after 36 hours of play. Original review. Played the original Windward and loved it—this one just feels like a downgrade. I’m not a fan of how ship upgrades work now. In the original, if I remember right, each part had a dedicated slot—ammo, cannon, crew, whatever. Made it simple and clean. This one? You can slap on like four cannons and two crews on the second ship you get. It's... interesting, I guess, but now you're stuck manually comparing every item to figure out what's worth equipping or selling. I don’t remember ever having to work this hard in the first game just to sort my loot. And don’t get me started on the trading. Absolute trash. You end up wasting hours sailing between provinces—or regions, or whatever they’re called—just to sell one item. Like seriously, how the hell do you mess that up? The only reason I can think of is they tried to make trading slightly more profitable? Maybe? But it’s absolutely not worth the pain of sailing halfway across the map, fighting the wind just to try to sell something, and then heading back empty-handed to do it all over again. I’m fine with the open map, though. The old checkerboard layout was nice, scaling difficulty the closer you got to the center—that was a solid system. Now it feels like difficulty is tied to your ship tier. I stomped everything on the starter ship, then immediately got bodied on the next tier up. Damage skill? Useless. Heal skill? Barely tickled the health bar, only gaining 2% health. Meanwhile, the enemy ripped half my ship’s HP off in one hit. There's also some weird armor mechanic now, but hell if I know what it's supposed to be doing. Overall? The first game’s better. Sure, multiplayer was a pain to set up, but at least the core game loop was solid. Haven’t tried co-op in this one yet—and probably won’t. Not gonna tell my buddies to drop nearly $20 on a game that’s gonna bore 'em to sleep. I’d love to see this game improve and build on what made the first one great, but right now? It’s just not worth the time or money. That said, I’ve got high hopes they’ll make some solid changes or balance tweaks down the line. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on updates, and if they fix this mess, I won’t hesitate to come back and change my review.

I want to thumbs up but after learning the basics mechanics it's kind of.... Nothing else. Will change rating if they add some content.

TLDR: Don't recommend, its initially fun but doesn't have enough depth, quickly gets boring and theres little capability in having a good province in the online map. Details: - Singleplayer was good but fights take forever even when you're mowing everything down and the world only advances while you're sitting there so short of keeping it running in the background the progress is astronomically slow.. There's a 12 minute timer on giving "town supplies" item to boost growth of provinces, so you're time locked into it instead of being able to powerlevel a province if you have the means. - When I went online I enjoyed it, but the online map that's used is small and there's a tiny amount of good locations, I counted two (out of probably a hundred spots) that would have met the criteria I was looking for, so you're left choosing a spot that doesn't have all the main resources and you constantly have to spend your time ferrying resources to it just to maintain its clothing/food/beverage/lumber/metal/masonry requirements. It would be a lot better if resources weren't sparse. - Some people had 6 to 8 resources in their province and were fully self sufficient while the rest are living on food stamp and have to trade constantly. How can you have a game that only 100 players can build a province, a core part of the game, but only 2% of them are actually great locations? If the game was popular (there's been 30 to 60 players on the last few days) it would be even worse, tons of people wouldn't even be able to participate in that portion online. In terms of gameplay, very fun combat but once you hit level 30 and have a good ship there's nothing left to do. You grind out tons of instances of 4 skull quests (hardest difficulty), get your best gear drops, then over time it'll increase 7.5% of base stats and then that's it. No crafting system, harder dungeons with better loot, no overarching storyline or end game content, just keep running the same instance over and over with 16 to 32 other people. Money has almost no meaning, you quickly get the best loot and there's nothing to spend it on. If you bring up issues about the game people say "its a skill issue" or some other form of insult. I topped damage boards constantly and got the best gear, I just think the game is severely lacking in map size and depth.. Silver lining is that the developer is very good, responsive, constantly making improvements. He is just one guy so there's no development team working on more content, but if the problem is he doesn't have a development team then why are we still paying a normal game's price ? If you're looking for a mindless fun game I'd recommend it but it's not something you can constantly play unless you enjoy doing the same thing over and over again. Not for me.

tl:dr: Turns the Windward sailing game into the Windward sailing simulation. If you think Windward was too simple, you might like it. I don't. My $0.02: This is the Master of Orion 3 of the sailing genre. They took the focus off the core elements of the original game to give us a simulation. But if we wanted a simulation, as opposed to a simple game, we wouldn't have played Windward in the first place. It's like going from Civilization to Europa Universalis. Here's a few of my observations: 1. Sloooooow. Wow, this is a slow game. Compared to Windward, sailing your ship anywhere is pulling teeth. Probably closer to the truth, tbh. But endlessly watching my little boat bob across the waves? No. That is not Windward. 2. Chrome. Shiny, shiny chrome. Simple subsystems like commodity trading are needlessly expanded & complicated with cruft. The lovely "those guys want this/nobody wants this" commodity selection mechanism is now a commodity speculation mini game. Why? If I want to trade commodities I'll call my broker, thanks. 3, Muddied separation of concerns. There is no fast travel map. Instead, there is the ill defined concept of "provinces". Yeah, I get it, the "fast travel map" is replaced with a massive world map so you can sail everywhere. And yeah, your crew will offer to "chart you a course" to a quest destination, for instance, which works kinda like fast travel did. But the province boundaries -- which are super important since they define spheres of control and player limitations -- are not clearly delineated. 4. Politics. In addition to the above, factions work in opposition to one another. Players don't have to get involved in such a subsystem, but it is confusing and not immediately apparent what the fan out from player choices may be beyond an increase or decrease in faction rep. This is a far cry from the way factions worked in Windward. Pirates were our sworn enemies, period, unless you chose the "factions at war" option: note "option", not "mandatory political subsystem you must navigate. 5. Ship design: Okay, yeah, this could be cool. Honestly, I have not played long enough yet for it to be a factor. But like other games with ship design subsystems, especially in the 4X world within which I would include the Windward games, I fear the min/max OCD trap. Deciding how to balance speed v. mobility, for instance, in Windward is bad enough. Adding the complication of how many guns of what kind positioned on which sides with what ammo ... omg I don't need a micromanager minigame, All of the above is forgivable, if only I could travel from one town to another in 30 seconds. Not happening... Sorry to be such a downer. Hope this game gets some streamlining. But best of luck to the designers.

Did you play the original Windward and wished it had better graphics but was worse in every other way? Then you may enjoy this. Otherwise steer clear.

Constant pirate attacks. Don't bother doing anything other than combat missions, you are just going to be in combat anyways. Menu UIs are MUCH worse than the first game. Might be ok for multiplayer, but singleplayer is terrible.

Loved the first game, was really looking forward to this, severely disappointed. Quests anywhere but not in the region you are in, wares you have with you can't be sold anywhere, no explanations, and so on. I really tried, but refunded it, it is just pain and no fun.

Start game on a small bark, yet with maneuverability of 500k ton oil tanker, storage that allows a few fishes, yet you are deemed as completely fine for quests to travel across ocean to transport cargos. Then you are immediately dragged into frays, which won't let you unload, skill-up, or even read tooltips properly. In the middle of the constant fight you have to figure how to delete/sell that pos log of wood which somehow got into your inventory with some color pattern for your ship. Purple, Now I am called Commodore Eggplant. Loose city to pirates. take quest to deliver and sell 8 redwood logs, which won't stack and take your whole storage. But no worries. you will be able to buy only one anyway. Buy new ship, with all existing trading commodities locked to old ship, with no way to transfer it over to the new one. I had 50h in its predecessor, but in this case there was no fun at all. This eggplant will require some more time to ripe.

3 hours and I'm bored. I can change my sail colors--YIPPEE!!!

An incredibly enjoyable game loop with seriously in-depth economic and combat systems that rival AAA games. Spend time fighting off a pirate armada in multiplayer (or solo), then unwind trading goods between different provinces to encourage town growth (or for a profit). There are dozens of different systems in Windward Horizon I could gush about, but to keep this review a reasonable length, I'll just cover my three favourites.

Ship Build Customisation

There can be 50 people in a server and chances are they are all running unique builds. The level of customisation available to outfit your ship is impressive, almost ridiculously so. Lower Deck Position cannons, ammunition, supply crates, sails, armour, and crews on your ship to optimise the stats generated from adjacency bonuses and penalties. Want to run a ship without cannons? Fine, take them off and add extra crews and supply crates for a max diplomacy or mobility builds. Top Deck To manage your ship, better make sure your Captain and First Mate have the appropriate skills, depending on what skills you select it can completely change your playstyle. Talent Trees Like any good RPG, Windward comes with talent trees for defense, offense, and support. Fully spec into a single tree, or become a hybrid build and take the best talents from multiple trees. The choice is all yours to make! Factions And on top of all that customisation you can sign up to represent an in-game faction that confers additional stat bonuses. Often these bonuses are not as easily acquired through other means, making the decision of which faction to join all the more important and meaningful.

Naval Combat

The ship vs ship battles in Windward are incredibly satisfying to play for hours and hours on end. If you are a sweatlord like me, you can have all your skills set to manual targeting, allowing you full control over everything your ship does. Whilst this does require an elevated APM, you'll be an absolute menace; perfectly managing your cooldowns and positioning to sink high priority pirates before they can damage you or your allies. If you'd prefer a more relaxed experience, there are 4 challenge levels to choose from to find the combat that is enjoyable for you. Skills can also be set to auto-target, allowing you to dedicate less brain power and APM to micromanaging and focus on ship movement/positioning.

Province Building, Crafting, Trading

Combat isn't your thing, or just need to unwind after a long session? Well Windward has a deep simulated economic system with actual goods production and supply/demand in each province. Establish your own province, select which workshops are constructed to exploit natural resources and manufacture into trade-able commodities, merchant those commodities to other provinces that demand what you produce, import what your province lacks with the profits from your exports. This is a VAST oversimplification of the province/trading system, every server reset I spend hours sailing around the ocean just in order to establish the perfect province, then perform dozens and dozens trade runs to keep it supplied. I get great enjoyment from scouting out trade routes to pick up the cheapest raw resources, craft them into commodities, and sell for a massive profit.

Cons

The pirate waifu's are kind of cringe, dialogue gives me second hand embarrassment. Early game can be a bit slow, would definitely recommend joining the friendly multiplayer servers if you find progress a little slow and need a little boost.

Conclusion

Buy the game, it's very fun.

I have 100 hours in Windward and was really excited to see this come out. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it in its current state because the pacing seems wildly off and the game seems to be missing some obvious QOL features. Update: I think the biggest QOL issue I had was inventory management. What I stored in the stash was mostly dyes, patterns, and town supplies and there just isn't enough space. It really felt like there should be more or separate tabs for each, or a way to 'consume' a pattern or dye to then make it available for use. There seems to be a hidden range in which you can place a new providence, which isn't shown or explained, which leads to a lot of wasted effort.

same as the last one with some added stuff

I'm genuinely really on the fence when it comes to this game. On one hand, I love naval games and I thoroughly enjoy the naval combat in this game. Even in single player, I have zero issue gettin' shxt done. The ability trees are neat and I am actually one of the people who fancies the idea of specializing. Never did like that "Jack of All Trades" nonsense. The game requires time and patience, but I don't think it takes too long to wrap your head around how to do things. But where this game started to lose me was the quest business. Boy howdy, is it tedious as all hell. While some quests are straight forward with who you need to talk to in order to progress, others are not. You can try to check your dialogue history in the quest menu, but sometimes that offers no answers. It turns into a mind-numbing wild goose chase as you check province after province so you can talk to one person. It's grating. It's tiresome. I just don't like how it's done. It doesn't help that a lot of the questlines just leave you feeling really unfulfilled. This game toes this awkward line of trying to throw some romance in some of your quests, but typically cucks you 3/4 of the way there. Sonya's storyline? Aggressively mediocre. Alvana's storyline? The ending of that was incredibly infuriating. Lani's was the only one where I was like: "You know what, that was nice." With those achievements out of my way, in any succeeding games I do, honestly, Lani's is probably the only storyline I will replay. (Except I still can't get my god damn fishing trip with her) The others can get bent, I don't need the ships. Dev, if you read this, please just commit to one or the other with this romancy stuff. I'd rather have the capacity to fully commit, even if it requires extra rep and additional missions/interactions. I'd also rather not have it at all than to be baited 3/4 of the way and get left hanging with every. single. instance. That is aggravating above all else. Until the aforementioned issues are addressed, I'm afraid it's a no from me.

I do enjoy the game. I have a lot of things i do like Sailing, the Arcardy Fighting. Trading, Building Provinces.. very fun. Once you understand it. What i dislike is the very abitrary way it is treating progression... I am on my 3rd Ship Next would be a Frigate but i am Almost MAXIMUM Level. I have more then enough crowns to buy a new one but can't cause Pirates raping every provice that tries to reach pop level 12. :( This feels a bit to MMO and not really Single Player. EDIT: Someone definitly added a Slider i just now noticed. Now i am definitly gonna sink even more Hours into this... God damn it... It is lovely :) Allright now i own a ship of the line... a very fun game. Nice and completely out of the blue, the dev is taking the suggestions to hard. Ninja Implementing most of them. Made it a great experience for me 105 hours only short 5 Achivements. I had a god damn blast :D I only wish for a few more ships maybe rest is sold. :) Thanks

The game wastes you time, it is too slow to level up and too much time wasted.

In its current pseudo-early-access build, this game is just stupid. Don't waste your time until the devs get it together and take some player feedback on the mess they're making. It's an RPG, right? Sells itself as a pirate RPG? Yeah, right.... Anyway, so I guess what you do in this game is you build the pirates up by building your character. What a concept. Want to make your game more difficult, improve your build and watch all your time invested in developing provinces evaporate because whatever you can do, the zombie-swarms of AI pirates can do better. Getting swarmed by pirates in Sloops of War, and you think for the sake of the provinces you're protecting, you should buy yourself a bigger ship and crew it up, arm it to the teeth? The very second you do, you should consider yourself doing that exact same build to literally every member of the swarm raiding the very province you think you're defending. Not only that! For some stupid reason, when you grind for hours and hours to get yourself a bigger ship, you are rewarded by automatically being penalized for your XP. All the abilities you unlocked? They vanish, and you have to all but start over -- the game graciously gives you a few of your skill points back so you can start uselessly and repetitively grinding all over again. Honestly, I loved the original, and they are patching this at an almost annoying pace -- if it's not early-access, why am I downloading updates practically on the hour to fix all the bugs...? But if their idea of fun is to just force players to repetitively grind against pirate raids made up of ships that automatically match their own, and you are literally just given the ultimatum of locking in for a half-hour of repetitive gameplay against these hordes of pirates or losing everything you worked for, then those updates are hardly improving anything. Honestly I consider the game unplayable right now and regret my loyalty to the original. Because I did love the original, I'll check back, but the last thing I'd do at this point in its undeclared early-access is recommend this game. I need to see the devs directly address the problem if I'm even going to bother any time soon. Third attempt at a playthrough, and this time I know the game and what to do different from the original. I won't continue this playthrough, and if I consider a fourth attempt...I don't even consider upgrading my ship in an option in an RPG where upgrading your ship is the main point of the game..... What are the devs even thinking?

I loved the original Windward, and had quite a lot of time in it. Sadly that's not going to be happening here. If I didn't know better I would have said this were a mobile game that got tidied up for PC. I didn't enjoy the combat at all. You don't even need to aim your shots. Fancy doing some well place fire barrels in the path of the enemy? Nope, all automated. Aim a well places broadside? Nope, not gonna happen. I picked up one mission where I was to smuggle something from one port to another, and I was not to raise suspicion of any other factions, so essentially you have to stay aware from anyone. I sailed out of the region into the new one. As I spawned in to the new region two faction ships spawned either side of me, and I couldn't move away in time! Suspicion was raised, and I refunded. What a waste.

I sail a bit IRL and nothing quite captures that feeling as well as Windward. The first game was the same and Horizon even better. Even the big AAA games, even the simulators, nothing quite feels like cruising along in your own sailing boat as much as Windward. I'm not entirely sure how it does it but it captures it better than any other. There's also plenty of stuff going on to keep you entertained on your journey - battles here and there, quests, relationships with the factions, levelling up stats, different cannons, crew, armour, ships, etc.

The community is very kind and welcoming, the dev works tirelessly to keep updates rolling, and the game is FUN (and quite complex). Don't let the simplicity fool you, this is a game you can easily sink a good number of hours into and the price is more than fair! I have been playing co-op with a friend and we struggled some at first, but everything is starting to click. I still have many other areas of the game to try such as helping create a settlement, hunting named pirates etc. Most of my time has been learning the trading and defending ports in a dedicated server. It was so cool seeing a bunch of ships firing at each other with cannon volleys and explosive barrels. I still get a kick out of watching larger ships get blown apart when you hit a last ditch cannon volley! Would I recommend this game: HELL YES! I have paid $60 dollars for games that didn't hold a candle to the fun factor of Windward Horizon and would easily recommend it to anyone that wants a cool pirate game with a little old school flair.