Xbox One code provided by 5 Lives Studios
Survival games have been around for a long time and, lately, they’ve needed some new ideas to revolutionize the genre. Windbound falls in that category by trying to add a story to motivate players’ continued interest even after losing everything. A great concept in theory but I wouldn’t call it a win.
Story
Windbound centers around protagonist Kara, who has been separated from her group during unforeseen events. She awakens as she’s washed up on a beach with no sign of her group anywhere. As Kara, players will scavenge on islands to survive and start piecing together her people’s forgotten past.
The story overall isn’t bad but it is extremely underutilized. You’ll find bits of Kara’s group’s history around the islands but they don’t offer too much detail. The game is divided into chapters, with each chapter’s end featuring a mural that adds more context to the story. There wasn’t enough to keep me motivated on the journey and it felt underwhelming by the end.
Gameplay
From the start, the gameplay let me down hard. Controls feel stiff and pretty antiquated. When I’d go to jump and climb onto something, I’d just fall. It even has a delay when you press its button prompt. Your only mission throughout the adventure is to climb towers to unlock a special area at the end of each chapter so I would’ve hoped that this would’ve been the first thing that they had nailed down.
I noticed other issues as well. Sometimes button commands wouldn’t work at all. I almost had to start a chapter from the start because the button didn’t work when I tried to use my glider and I got stuck in an area I wasn’t supposed to be in. The camera would stutter often—especially in a specific section at the end of every chapter.
As I said, the only mission you have is climbing these small towers. They don’t differ too much from each other and aren’t hard to climb up either. It’s not a challenge like in Far Cry or Dying Light. You climb a few connected pillars and voila.
Windbound’s crafting is pretty standard for a survival game. It’s what you’ll spend most of your time doing and is simple and pretty easy to understand. You’ll chop dead trees, pick earthy vegetables, and hunt wild animals, using everything you can to keep Kara going. After you’ve gathered the materials you can make boats, weapons, wearables, and foods.
The craftable weapons available boil down to spears, bows, and slings. Some materials offer better durability and effectiveness towards the different animals’ skins. The wearables offer different attributes that can help your endurance in the wild as well. They also add a nice cosmetic side in their design too as they alter how Kara looks.
Boat crafting is the most unique when comparing it to the rest of the crafting possibilities. We’ve seen all of that done in every other survival title but the boats are done in a nifty way. You can make plain rafts that you’ll use for the first couple of chapters but after that is when you can play around a bit. Once you get an axe, that’s when you get to have some real fun with the crafting system.
You can make some really cool boats with a variety of materials, each offering different degrees of durability. It made it feel like a real choice of either using the readily available material that was weak or waiting and building up my supply of a sturdier material. Armors, spikes, and enchanted items can be mounted to it, giving you leverage on the open seas.
The sailing aspect is pretty basic though which makes the payoff for creating wondrous floating devices a check that can’t be cashed. It offers sailing mechanics we’ve already seen and that are done better in other games. Turning your sails and catching wind makes for some fun naval challenges but when you have the sails in the optimal position to catch said wind you’ll frequently remain at the same slow pace. It’s kind of a turn-off.
Combat isn’t any better, unfortunately. The animals do offer different traits and attacks to create the need for alternating weapons during encounters. But the thing that ground my gears was the fact that unless you have the lock button pressed when in combat, you don’t have a snowball’s chance that you’ll make contact with your target. Your attacks are pretty delayed too. I’m not sure if this is a design choice or an antiquated control problem but I digress.
The open-world has some decently varied islands due to its procedurally-generated world but most of them sport the same look. I use the term “open-world” very loosely here as the game is doled out in chapters with each one’s islands changing from the last. There are about 6 islands in each chapter give or take to scavenge.
It’s more like a non-linear type of game with open areas. Even though the islands change from each chapter, there isn’t a huge amount of variation between one to the other. The islands in each chapter have the same perils and rock formations in the ocean surrounding them.
There are some secrets to uncover to help bring the lore to life at abandoned settlements. Most of these hold weapons and shards. Shards are used to purchase special items that can permanently enhance Kara’s abilities. Some of the islands hold shrines that can upgrade your health or stamina bar. Mystical objects, once found, can be implemented into your crafting to offer more of an edge.
Visuals
Developer 5 Lives Studios did a fine job in the art created. Everything felt fresh from Kara’s look, the look of animals, and all of the craftable equipment. I’d say that the visuals are the absolute best part of the whole shebang. Colors were vibrant and perfectly executed across all landscapes, beasts, and vegetation. When the islands did show their differences, I was immediately aware of what I could expect on that given island.
The animations were pretty smooth and I would’ve liked to see more cinematics. That’s one of my main gripes is that there aren’t more cinematics to see Kara’s emotions to what’s going on around here. She’s separated from everyone she’s ever known as she sweeps an endless ocean to find them. We never get to see the sense of helplessness and loneliness that anyone would feel in her position.
Audio
I enjoyed a lot of the ambient noises throughout my journey. Cutting grass and chopping trees was cartoony and punchy in its delivery. I’m glad because these are the sounds that are going to be coming from your speakers most of the time.
The music score is very beautifully done. The best tracks were the light tropical ones that offered a sense of whimsy to Kara’s traumatic journey. I do wish that the sound mix transitioned better when introducing combat music. I’d cringe even coming close to an enemy, not for the fact of the combat but the music included. Everything sound-wise is balanced correctly but when coming in contact with an enemy a new track starts blaring out of nowhere. There were a handful of moments where I got caught startled solely because of the loudness of what was going on.
Replayability
While it is a survival game; once you finish the last chapter you’re finished. There’s no option to continue on the open seas. If you want to play again, you can do so as you’re allowed three save profiles. There aren’t any collectibles that make it a priority for anyone to find the need to play more than once, if that. It felt like a slog just to get through it once and even though the crafting is fun, the game feels like it places it in the backseat to a story that’s barely chugging along.
What It Could Have Done Better
On the subject of crafting, I wish the buttons to switch between the crafting menu and the sack menu were done differently. I frequently pressed the wrong buttons while trying to see what I had and what I wanted to craft. Also, when using either of these, the world slows down around you but it looks kind of sloppy. Everything just jitters and it doesn’t look very smooth.
The game isn’t fully iron-out in its performance. I think a couple more weeks or months would’ve done it well to clean up these issues. I’d even run into a game-breaking crash along the way too.
The climbing-the-tower trope is stale. While I don’t hate it, I wish it wasn’t the only main goal. There could’ve been more to do and I feel like this was a cop-out. The developers could’ve at the very least made them slightly difficult to climb them as you progress. The last tower is the same as the first tower—easy.
This journey would’ve benefited from being truly open-world. I think the choice of separating it into chapters instead of putting everything into a big open ocean was a wasted opportunity. There was a lot of lore that the developers created, so why not have more island variables with different things to find to unlock specific locations and items to further the story along? I dig the procedurally-generated schtick that everyone is going for nowadays but the handling of it in Windbound came across as uninspired to me.
Being that it’s a survival game first, it shouldn’t end. There should’ve been more for the player to explore after the end-game content. I think that the setup for it makes the survival aspect feel like an afterthought. During my entire playthrough, I kept thinking to myself, “Why is this survival-based again?”
Verdict
Windbound is a title that I wanted so hard to love but in fact, let me down in the long-run. The world created and the story that was set up deserved more than what the developers delivered on. There’s so much potential underneath the final product and that’s what’s most upsetting. This feels like a project that had more to add but for some reason couldn’t get it to come full-circle. While adding a story to the genre is a fantastic idea, I don’t think this one stuck the landing.
