Open-world survival games can be devilishly tricky to get right, especially these days. There are just so many of them at this point, lurking in Steam Early Access and beyond.
Even if you do find a properly unique way into the genre, even if you find a way to make your game look or feel different from the hundreds of other survival games out there... you still have to balance exploration, resource management, and general survival. You have to do all of this without ever tipping the balance so that players are too busy doing one of those things to care about the others. And you have to do all this and somehow make it fun? Like I said, devilishly tricky.
Into this crowded and messy arena steps Windbound, which both looks and feels an awful lot like a cross between Disney's Moana and The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild. A potent blend on paper. It's the latest effort from 5 Live Studios, a development team made up of industry veterans who've worked on everyone from Grand Theft Auto to Star Wars. But does this wealth of industry experience bring enough to the table to ensure Windbound really stands out from the many, many survival games that came before it?
My answer, based on an incredibly brief one hour hands-on with the game, is a tentative "yes". There are a lot of things Windbound does that we've already seen time and time again in dozens of other games... but its gorgeous artstyle and sprawling, procedurally-generated, oceans might just be the hook that reels you in.
As someone who tells anyone who'll listen that The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker is my all-time favourite video game, I was immediately drawn to Windbound's promise of exploring a vast ocean in a cheerful-looking cartoon world. Not enough video games let you live out the fantasy of becoming a sea-faring adventurer, imo - and I need my fix.
The good thing is that Windbound doesn't screw around. You wake up on an island, pick up a magic paddle from some ancient ruins, and you're away. This is a survival game, don't forget, so the first port of call is to put together everything you need to build a boat and some weapons.
Thankfully the requirements to fashion the most basic materials aren't all that demanding. You can fashion a spear from a single stick, and a sling from which to fire small stones out of grass. You'll also be able to put together your first boat from grass - a crude canoe which struggles in choppy waters, but allows you to just about make it from A to B.
As you explore, you'll gather more tools and resources that allow you to upgrade your weapons, inventory space, and boat. Jumping into a save from later on in the game, I was able to sail around on a seriously pimped out bamboo deck that made use of two canoes. It even had a cooking pot for crafting potions, and a little campfire for preparing meals. It's the kind of setup that a London-based landlord would probably charge you £3,000 PCM for.
You'll also be able to build things like sails, which allow you to move across the ocean quicker, and an anchor that stops your boat from drifting off if you haven't parked it right up against the shore. With a fair few island types to explore (including swamps, forests, and beaches), I imagine there are a whole bunch of recipes and tools that can be unlocked as you go.
But why, exactly, are you exploring the sea in the first place? Besides the promise of new resources and tools, that is. Your ultimate goal, once you awake on your procedurally-generated ocean, is to track down three parts of a key from three towering ancient monuments.
Do this, and you progress the story, which centers around working out exactly what happened to your civilization. It seems gameplay will involve a loop of tracking down the three key segments, opening up a larger temple-like area, and then moving on to a new part of the ocean where, based on what I played in Chapter 4, you do the same thing but in a larger part of the world with more islands, resources and more challenging enemies.
It'll be interesting to see just how much of an incentive the game's story provides us to push on, as I didn't get that much of a feel for it from what I played. I'm a little concerned that floating around various procedurally-generated islands with the same task might end up becoming a little repetitive, but again, I only played an hour - that makes it very hard to gauge the overall flow of what's supposed to be an open-world survival game.
There are certainly some rough edges that I hope will be sanded down a little between now and release. There were moments when sailing did feel a little sluggish, and the crafting menu was a bit of a pain to navigate. These are things I'm confident are more a matter of players getting used to than anything else, however.
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Combat on the other hand, feels like a genuine weak link, and the only thing I'm really concerned about at the moment. In the few encounters I had, battling wild enemies felt like trying to move through mud as I combined clumsy dodges with painfully slow thrusts of my spear. The pace of it is just a little off, and not what I would have expected or hoped for from a game that, at least visually, evokes Breath Of The Wild.
My hope is that with more crafting options there'll be more ways to approach combat a wee bit differently. As it stands, head-to-head is absolutely not the way to go.
Those few minor concerns aside, there's clearly a strong foundation here, and a gorgeous game that has all the right ideas on paper. If it can keep the surprises coming at a steady pace over the course of the adventure, Windbound could end up being a really rather charming addition to any gamer's library.
Featured Image Credit: 5 Live StudiosTopics: Switch, Indie, The Legend of Zelda