So after signing up for PS Plus Extra I suddenly found myself with access to more than 100 games. Obviously not all of these games are going to be AAA and there are entirely too many of them for me to spend very much time on all of them. I have never heard of most of these games despite the fact that I stay pretty up-to-date with gaming.
Seeing as how I don't have enough time to truly play all of these games I decided to adopt a rather non-committal way of getting through a lot of them. I am going to download all of them one by one and at least try them out for an hour or so before inevitably giving up on most of them.
I started with Windbound because the art style looked like something that would appeal to me. Unfortunately that is kind of where it all ended as far as the appeal is concerned and I ended up giving up on the game rather quickly.
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I knew nothing else about this game before I downloaded it and that doesn't really matter to me all that much seeing as how there is no additional cost associated with it. I quickly found out that this game, which has a very brief introduction that doesn't really tell you a great deal about the story, is a survival game. I am ok with survival games provided they aren't rogue-like because that is just lame as hell needing to start all the way from the start of something any time you die.
The controls are pretty simplistic and getting started is rather effortless. The commands are popped up on the screen and the tutorial is simple enough. I know that in my case it really needed to be because I was damn near blackout drunk when i first fired it up. You wash up on shore with nothing but a knife and you run around picking up materials on the island until you can somehow build a boat out of straw and then you sail to another island where the materials you need in order to advance become increasingly complicated.
Before I start bitching I just want to point out that I do not have a problem with the gathering of resources. In other games I will actually go out of my way in order to do so even if it isn't a necessary part of the overall game. I think of Witcher 3 and Dragons Age: Inquisition for instances in which I gladly gathered resources. The problem that I have with the resource gathering in Windbound is that you have an extremely limited inventory and will soon find yourself faced with not being able to pick things up. So all of those rocks that you spent all that time picking up now have to be discarded in order to pick up something else that is equally as useless.
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You aren't given much indication about what the hell it is that you are supposed to be doing so on my first attempt I ended up starving to death because I was not made aware of the fact that getting food was going to be as important as it turned out to be. Also, the good food is acquired by killing wildlife and this is where the game totally loses me.
Combat is repetitive, boring, and time-consuming. You also take a ton of damage when something hits you and since you were only killing said thing in order to get food to replenish health and stamina this is a rather silly process, isn't it? I'm hunting to regain health but will lose health in the process. Also, at least early on in the game you have to rely on melee to kill something at all and you have extremely weak weapons at the start. I really feel like the devs missed the mark here because you basically have to hunt, yet they don't give you any trash mobs to practice on. They throw you straight to the wolves.
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Combat is clunky and the only ranged weapon you have access to early on in the game is a sling that does almost zero damage. This is when I figured out what the rocks are for but honestly, there isn't much reason to try to sling any of the enemies who are going to result in any sort of useful loot seeing as how you aren't capable of carrying enough rocks to actually kill them. Therefore you have to get up close and personal with your knife and risk getting thwacked at all times. Of course there are weaker enemies as well such as this boar-like creature, but it runs away from you and you are not fast enough to catch it, nor are you agile enough with your sling to even slow it down. It's just a dumb combat system and not at all intuitive.
There is also an extreme lack of story and/or direction as to where the hell you are supposed to be going or what you are doing. Once they introduced the fact that certain loot and also weapons that deteriorate over time I had flashbacks of Breath of the Wild and knew that this was not going to be the game for me. After my 3rd death I was not enjoying the game even though I was making progress. When you travel from one island to the next it is really just the same old thing happening over and over again.
So I can't really recommend this game seeing as how it failed to capture my attention for even 2 hours - one of which I barely remember even playing because I was hammered drunk. I understand it was a very small studio that made this but just like a lot of other games I feel as though they focused so much on having killer graphics that they forgot to make a game that people are actually going to want to play.
I would imagine if you are a huge fan of survival games and are willing to go through the maddening process of inventory management, then you might enjoy this for a little while. In the meantime though I think that there are much better games in this genre out there.
Games played so far in my trip through all the "Extra" games on Playstation Plus
- Windbound