Oh boy, Windforge. I've managed to put 48 hours into the game over the past few weeks, alternating between love and hate for it. While the concept is fun, and flying around in and fighting with airships is enjoyable, the game is plagued with a bunch of issues that make it difficult to recommend. Roughly in order from most to least severe:
- Performace issues and memory leaks. The game routinely staggers even with high-end CPUs. If you alt+tab out of the game, you'll find everything else running slowly until the game is closed. Stay on any one scene too long and you'll suffer a memory leak. This is most noticeable when observing the aftermath of defeating a boss, which can bring your computer to a crawl, and cause Windows to behave strangely (i.e. taskbar corruption).
- No multiplayer. It was a Kickstarter stretch goal in both arena and standard forms, but the Kickstarter barely succeeded in the first place.
- Physics issues. Your grappling hook can never decide if its rigid or elastic, and can get stuck between blocks. NPCs not locked to airships (pilots and gunners) have strange behavior: NPCs standing on the ship will randomly and mysteriously be flung off, and ramming/rammed monsters will sometimes pass through walls (without destroying them) into the interior of the ship.
- Braindead AI. Mobs with guns will run around randomly while occasionally taking potshots at you (and bullets from non-automatic weapons move slower than thrown rocks). Mobs in dungeons won't jump, so they can easily be dealt with by using platforms. Mobs on ships will jump, usually falling off the ship in the process. Enemy ships won't dodge gunfire, so you can fly into their blindspot and trivialize the fight. This also shows up with boss fights, which were designed to take place within the close confines of a dungeon arena; should you take the fight outside, killing the boss is trivial, as it won't even shoot at you until it gets close enough.
- Building ships is a pain. The game uses 2.5D isometric visuals, so instead of a pure side view like most Terraria-likes, foreground blocks are stretched diagonally into the background. Since you interact with background tiles, this can make precise placement of blocks (especially background blocks) difficult without pre-planning. Some furnitures (i.e. flotation balloons) are not symmetric despite appearing as such, so making a ship symmetric often requires compromise. The way vertical lift is calculated isn't clear, and lift will be reduced upon loading a save. You also shouldn't build and deconstruct closed loops, as a bug can cause framework to remain in place (purely visual, but annoying).
- Repairing ships is tedious. You have to mouse over your entire ship, the radius of the repair tool is small, and it takes a not insignificant amount of time to repair even wood blocks. Large ships can take several minutes to bring back to full health. Some people have commented that it's faster to deconstruct and rebuild the ship than it is to repair it.
- Can't deconstruct buildings to collect their blocks and furniture. You can destroy them, but this leaves damaged framework which also can't be removed. You also can't ram into buildings, as the outermost framework is impenetrable (you'd destroy the outermost blocks at most).
- Building structures/bases is nearly pointless. You can't build docks to park and change your ship, mobs will always spawn in scenes that aren't cities, and the inventory you place into your built chest can be accessed from any other chest you build.
- Lack of content (with the caveat that I haven't played through all of the game). From what I've seen, there are only three main terrain types, and all procedural dungeons are uninteresting mazes. There are no procedural or random quests. The variety of ships you can encounter is rather limited.
- Inventory management is painful. Your inventory is an alphabetically sorted list with five categories (your chest has no categories). Tooltips take a while to show up, and equipment won't be compared against what you currently have equipped. There's also a bug that will cause counts to get stuck at 999, though the actual amount of stuff you have is greater.
- Various inconsistencies and lack of polish. Some furniture, when deconstructed, will return both the furniture and the materials (i.e. you have infinite copper ingots by building and deconstructing a sink repeatedly). Town NPCs won't react when attacked. Momentum at scene transitions is reset, so if you don't hold down the movement button, your ship may randomly alternate between scenes. When using certain tools, your character's legs will pop apart at the knees. Some constructed objects have significantly more weight than the components used to create them (i.e. background blocks).
- The game is very forgiving. Mobs won't follow you between scenes, and will disappear if you move far enough away on the same scene. You can repair and rebuild anywhere, even changing your ship's configuration in the middle of combat if you're quick enough, whereas enemy ships won't even try to repair. Should you die, there's no penalty; your character and ship get sent back to a city dock and you keep your inventory (hence, if you're in the middle of nowhere, the best way back to the city is to die). You get a decently powerful ship for the early game from the beginning. Honestly, the main reason I've clocked so many hours on this game is because I started over a few times, applying house rules in order to try to make the game feel more challenging, but with limited success.
So, Windforge can be fun, but can also be very frustrating depending on what you're trying to do. I got it for $1 (technically in a bundle, but I bought it for this game alone) and feel let down but not cheated. Knowing what I know now, I'd probably wait for it to show up in a bundle with other games I'm interested in before buying.
As for the future development of Windforge, one of the devs still comments on the Steam forum. He's said things to the effect of:
- He got tired of developing the game and had to take a long vacation from it shortly after release (the game was out for two to three months before he disappeared for about a month).
- His team has an internal build that fixes various issues, but when or if a patch will be released is uncertain.
- He'd like to continue adding features, but has already shifted his team's focus to a new, unannounced project.
Make of that what you will.
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Topic: Game Bundles Megathread (Read 48201 times)