Ubisoft is obviously a much bigger company than Kraken Express. They released their Live Service pirate adventure game Skull & Bones as a "quadruple A" game with a $70 price tag in February 2024 and failed miserably with it. You can now get the game for $30, which is exactly the release price of Windrose. But if you knew nothing about the two games, you might still assume that a game with twice the number of A's from a far more experienced game company and two years after release would be a lot better than an unknown company's first game in early access. You'd be wrong. Windrose in early access is a far better game offering far more fun than Skull & Bones. Windrose is potential "indie game of the year" material, and might be this year's "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33". It sold a million copies in the first week, and has 222k concurrent players on Steam, a number that is still growing. Skull & Bones has 280 concurrent players on Steam, nearly a thousand times less.

Having said that, Windrose doesn't reinvent the wheel. People call it "pirate Valheim", and that is pretty much what you get. In the first few hours you actually don't do much piraty stuff at all, but just the usual stuff you would do in games like Valheim or Enshrouded: Gather wood, stone, and plant fibers, build a workbench, make basic tools, build a basic camp. Once you find copper you get your first ship, but it is just a small sloop without any guns. You need to do find a bigger boat, rescue your old crew, repair the boat, and equip it, before you can really go doing any ship-to-ship combat a bit later in the game. And while ship-to-ship combat is important in Windrose, it is just a part of the game. You still need to do a lot of resource gathering, base building, exploring of various islands, and combat on land.

On normal difficulty, land combat in Windrose is relatively difficult, and you are likely to die repeatedly at the start, especially from boars. As this isn't the part of the game I am most interested in, I am playing on easy difficulty. You can also customize difficulty, e.g. making enemies hit normally hard, but have lower hit points. This is already part of one of Windrose's strong points: Quality of Life features are outstandingly good. Anything you ever were annoyed with in any other survival crafting game, Windrose is doing it the right way: Crafting from chests, easy building mode, everything is very smooth and comfortable. You don't die from hunger, but food increases your health bar, which ends up with you still wanting to have food all the time, but without feeling penalized so much if you don't have it. Forget the "early access" part, you don't feel it when playing the game. It just means that the devs will add a lot more content to the game in the coming year or so. And while I *would* like a few more enemy types, Windrose doesn't feel unfinished or buggy at all.

The internet is full of comparisons of Windrose, with its $2 million budget, compared to not only Skull & Bones but other recent $200 million budget games. While I wouldn't stretch that too far, and the more expensive games certainly have some superior graphics features, the general point is correct: From the game experience and fun, Windrose is currently beating out several games with 100 times its budget. But even if you aren't interested in that discussion, and just want a fun pirate survival crafting adventure game, I would very much recommend Windrose. Even at the most basic consideration, this is easily 60 hours of fun for 30 bucks, as long as you like survival crafting games in general.