Game Review: Windbound (Switch)

Wind­bound by Koch Media is a sur­vival action/adventure game released on the Switch and oth­er game plat­forms August 2020. You con­trol Kara, a sur­vivor of a calami­ty on her solo jour­ney to find answers and sur­vive her island world.

Rat­ing: 2.25 out of 5

Price: Paid $14.72 out of MSRP $29.99

Rec­om­mend­ed: No

One Word Descrip­tion: Frus­trat­ing

• Pros: Sur­vival ele­ments, Wind Wak­er style of play­ing (if you like that), craft­ing sys­tem, pleas­ing graph­ics, music not over­bear­ing or annoy­ing
• Cons: Bat­tle sys­tem, repet­i­tive, slow­ness, sev­er­al irri­tat­ing ele­ments, debil­i­tat­ing lack of stor­age, wind-depen­dent sail­ing, whole-lev­el-repeat upon death

I was very excit­ed about play­ing this game when I first bought it. Not only did the graph­ics look good, the sur­vival ele­ments were intrigu­ing, and a female pro­tag­o­nist? Bring it! I chose the eas­i­est dif­fi­cul­ty which would allow me to keep all of my items upon death and hit Start. The game began well enough with an intro that was­n’t too long, and soon you were thrown onto an obvi­ous tuto­r­i­al-area. The tuto­r­i­al pop­ups weren’t too pushy and I went about gath­er­ing things and try­ing out the moves. I LOVE gath­er­ing things! Kara put togeth­er her lit­tle boat made from grass and sticks and off I went with an oar to nav­i­gate dif­fer­ent islands. As you gath­er and find new mate­ri­als, new recipes unlock, form­ing a col­lec­tion ele­ment that keeps you gath­er­ing. With each new chap­ter, you find bet­ter mate­ri­als and mon­sters, allow­ing you to, nat­u­ral­ly, craft bet­ter qual­i­ty items and upgrades includ­ing weapons, tools, and boats. In this game, there time-relat­ed degra­da­tion such as hunger bar, food spoilage, and break­ing weapons. Not my favorite thing to con­tend with, but it is a sur­vival game after all.

As the game pro­gressed, I was able to out­fit my boat with a sail and expe­ri­ence prob­a­bly the most damn­ing part of the game for me: Sail­ing. At first it was­n’t so bad because I’d loved the heck out of The Leg­end of Zel­da: The Wind Wak­er, and Wind­bound remind­ed me of the beloved game. How­ev­er, frus­tra­tion soon became the name of the game. I don’t know if it was bad luck or what, but sim­ply EVERY SINGLE TIME I depart­ed one island for anoth­er, the wind was blow­ing the exact oppo­site direc­tion. Ini­tial­ly not a big deal because I fig­ure it’s just my bad luck, but it occurred with­out fail and even when I decid­ed to uti­lize the wind direc­tion to head back to a pre­vi­ous­ly vis­it­ed island, the wind changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly halfway through the trek. Aaaand again with the ridicu­lous­ly slow and cum­ber­some tra­verse. Some parts of Wind Wak­er are like that sim­ply because you would soon find some­thing to make life eas­i­er, but I’ve made it to Chap­ter 4 and there is still noth­ing. You can upgrade your sail with the increas­ing­ly bet­ter qual­i­ty mate­ri­als which does increase speed, but it does­n’t help much when the wind refus­es to coop­er­ate.

Now to address the fight­ing sys­tem. I found this to be extreme­ly clunky. Kara can dodge, attack, jump, tar­get, and run. Weapons so far include the unbreak­able knife, spears, slings, and bow/arrow. Even­tu­al­ly, you will find abil­i­ties that allow you to par­ry, roll and attack, and charge-lunge. How­ev­er, the only one I was able to use prop­er­ly with­out unfail­ing injury was the dodge and attack. Bat­tles with large mon­sters or boss­es end up being bor­ing strafe -> dodge -> attack bat­tles. The worst part, though, is that even if you dodge and attack, the hit only lands every 3rd or 4th time as the ene­my will dodge your attacks. Try­ing a sling­shot or arrow is entire­ly too slow/weak and eas­i­ly ends with your injury. Par­ry nev­er worked for me, ever, and lunge means you will get hurt and like­ly miss any­ways. And in the high chance that you get hit by the ene­my because there’s a slow­ness about Kara (or is it lag?) you’ll most­ly like­ly not just get hit once, but 2, 3, or 4 times in a row because when Kara falls over, she takes an eter­ni­ty to get up but is blessed with zero invin­ci­bil­i­ty in the time that you have no con­trol over her move­ments. The only nice thing is that you can pause the game by open­ing up the food pouch and using life restor­ing items. That is, if you have enough room for them or you have any.

Over­all, the item gath­er­ing and degra­da­tion are per­fect­ly fine and works well. You can use the degrad­ed food items as ingre­di­ents for dif­fer­ent potions. The biggest gripe here, though, is the fact that there are way more items than there is space for. Nor­mal­ly, it would­n’t be a big deal to dump some things because the game keeps every sin­gle item in the place you dropped it no mat­ter where you trav­el on the map, but remem­ber the aggra­vat­ing sail­ing? I def­i­nite­ly do not want to waste my time trav­el­ing back for sticks or thick grass, so I just did with­out them. You can set up either a buck­et or anoth­er bag on your boat to hold excess items, but even with that, there is not enough room for the stuff you need. Do you keep mate­ri­als to make a new weapon, or to make a fire, or heal­ing items? Most of the time, I end­ed up hav­ing not enough heal­ing items (the hunger bar degrades quick­ly, con­sid­er­ing the time it takes the trav­el between islands) to make room for my weapons, nec­es­sary tools, and defense items, as well as rare ani­mal parts. The cher­ry on top here, is that the meat that you need to make heal­ing items from is only ran­dom­ly dropped by ene­mies. You can go an entire island killing small ani­mals and not get a sin­gle piece of meat.

Then there were lit­tle things that annoyed the heck out of me, like the stu­pid lit­tle move­ment Kara does when­ev­er she stands up: brush­ing off her knees. It was kind of endear­ing at first, but then it just got plain obnox­ious because she does it, every sin­gle time. It’s a major time waster when you’ve got 8 mon­sters to mine for meat (hope­ful­ly), a declin­ing hunger meter, and a large mon­ster lurk­ing near­by. Then, there was try­ing to put pro­tec­tive cladding on the boat to pre­vent dam­age. If I placed a deck on the boat, I’d have to dis­man­tle that and the mast FIRST, and then place the cladding and then redo the deck and mast. It’s a com­plete­ly unnec­es­sary action and a major time waster. Yet anoth­er is the boat deck itself: it adds a large square space on the boat and one would nat­u­ral­ly assume that, yessss, the extra space will now allow place­ment of more than one boat extra (fire, bag, buck­et, chest), but nope. No expan­sion. Com­plete­ly use­less. That lone ele­ment of adding more stor­age space would have encour­aged me con­tin­ue to play the game despite the obnox­ious sail­ing.

For what­ev­er rea­son (I’m going to assume you learn this at the end of the game), each chap­ter is com­plete­ly ran­dom­ly gen­er­at­ed. When you die, no mat­ter where you are in the chap­ter, you must repeat it. Yes. Stu­pid winds, unex­plained pur­ple blobs, and all. Again. With­out any clue as to where any­thing is on the map any­more. It also SAVES the game auto­mat­i­cal­ly, too, which then begs the ques­tion, why give a man­u­al “save game” func­tion to begin with? Ran­dom­ly gen­er­at­ed is not that big a deal aside from the do-over frus­tra­tion, but here’s where the qual­i­ty con­trol peo­ple did­n’t do a good job: some of the items you can find on each map (stat upgrades, sea shards. Option­al, though high­ly encour­aged) can only be accessed via cer­tain tools or abil­i­ties that you might not even have yet and would­n’t get until lat­er, after that chap­ter. In my very first ran­dom­ly gen­er­at­ed map, I found some upgrade that I could not access because I did­n’t have a glid­er. That glid­er was­n’t able to be craft­ed as I need­ed mon­ster parts that belonged to some­thing only found in the next chap­ter. What? Then why put it in there?! After some online search­ing, the steam forum mem­bers found some under­wa­ter item that you get indi­ca­tors for on the map when you sail (just like Wind Wak­er), but, again, you can’t access it until you get some abil­i­ty that appar­ent­ly some peo­ple nev­er even were offered in the course of their games.

The rep­e­ti­tion. In each chap­ter, you must fig­ure out how to climb 3 tow­ers on 3 dif­fer­ent islands some­where on the map. Then you sail to the north­ern­most part of the map where each of those lit up tow­ers opens stairs to a boss. You beat the boss, step through the por­tal, and then you have to ride your boat through the exact same tun­nel sequence, though each time you have to avoid dif­fer­ent obsta­cles before reach­ing the por­tal to the next chap­ter. It’s too long. It’s extreme­ly bor­ing. You already have to sail too much dur­ing each chap­ter and then they make you do it again. Ugh. The first go round was fine, but…yeah. Sigh.

I did not fin­ish it. I fin­ished lev­el 3 and start­ed into 4 and that was it for me. No more. The good news is that 1 year after release the game devel­op­ers made the Chap­ter 3 boss fight a ton eas­i­er. Read­ing through the Steam forum was enough to make me want to stop even before reach­ing that boss fight (appar­ent­ly it was not only impos­si­ble, but you’d have to start the entire chap­ter again when you inevitably died), but I want­ed to give it a try out of pure curios­i­ty. The fight end­ed up being laugh­ably easy and boost­ed my hopes for a bet­ter expe­ri­ence in the next por­tion of the game since they did fix that part. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Chap­ter 4’s first island was not only sur­round­ed by rocks and only had one entrance (mean­ing more dumb sail­ing against wind), but the lack of stor­age space made it 100% impos­si­ble for me to con­tin­ue. Not only were the new mon­sters too dif­fi­cult giv­en the equip­ment avail­able up until that point, but there were just too many new mate­ri­als and…INSUFFICIENT SPACE. My tools broke and I had noth­ing with me to make new ones. I required the new mate­ri­als PLUS the old ones which weren’t read­i­ly avail­able, and even if there were, then the mon­sters were too hard and I was already almost dead. Hope­less. Done. No more, thanks.

Over­all: It almost seemed like some­one enjoyed Wind Wak­er and want­ed to cre­ate a sim­i­lar game but with sur­vival ele­ments. The begin­ning was fun, enjoy­ing the sim­ple premise of sur­vival, sail­ing, and a vague, mys­te­ri­ous sto­ry­line. Then it just got frus­trat­ing. VERY frus­trat­ing. I would not rec­om­mend it and feel like I wast­ed a good chunk of my life and mon­ey. It’s sad­den­ing, because I feel like a lit­tle pol­ish or qual­i­ty game test­ing would have uncov­ered the lit­tle issues and made it more playable. Like, add a wind con­trol ele­ment, or a motor, or just make the wind nicer. Oh you’re try­ing to go north? Let me change the wind a lit­tle to help you. Thank you, game! And def­i­nite­ly add more stor­age space on the boat. Fix­ing those 2 game-break­ing com­po­nents alone would have made up for all the oth­er annoy­ances of the game. It’s a shame, real­ly.