It’s always an exciting moment in gaming when a unique genre comes to the forefront. There’s been a trend over the last few years towards games that focus on crafting. It started with a really ground-breaking game (it had something to do with Mining and Crafting, but you probably didn’t hear about it). It was then followed by a slew of games inspired by the same concept (Terraria, Don’t Starve, Starbound, Rust, Epic Inventor – throw a rock at Kickstarter and you’ll likely hit another half a dozen). When I learned about another game that made use of this crafting mechanic, but which also combined it with a Contra-style shooting mechanic, it sounded to be a match made in heaven. Enter Windforge.
The crafting system – the springboard for most of the game – is pretty run-of-the-mill. It’s nothing you haven’t seen in something like Terraria. However, where this becomes a problem is that Windforge doesn’t have as plentiful or available resources as Terraria. For example, say I’m playing Terraria and I need copper. I’d simply go to a mine, and if for some reason I don’t have a mine or there’s not one close by, I could just start digging on the spot and there’s a pretty good chance that I would run into either A) a copper vein or B) a series of caverns from which I can burrow deeper into the earth and perhaps find the copper. In Windforge, the whole game world consists of a series of islands in the sky. This means that if you need copper and you just start digging away, then you run a pretty good chance of digging through to the other side of the island and potential falling to your doom.
Furthermore, even if you’re just looking for a copper vein in the rock, for example, you’ll never know if you’re getting close to one or not until you actually bump into it, because Windforge uses a tricky line of site system where everything looks homogeneous until you burrow into it. This mechanic is actually kind of neat when you’re pushing your way through a dungeon, but when you’re looking for resources in the ground it just makes life miserable.
As for the ‘Contra-style’ combat; the shooting controls are not as intuitive as you might like. You move with traditional WASD controls and you shoot with the mouse. This works great if you’re standing still, but if you’re getting shot at, you’ll want to jump and dodge and move around. However, if you jump, the whole screen moves, which throws your aim off. You’ll move the mouse to correct your aim mid-jump, but that will usually cause you to over-correct. It eventually got to the point where in order to ensure that I would hit my target I would either have to be within point-blank range or resolve myself to taking some hits. This makes Windforge’s dungeons nearly unbearable.
This is an excerpt from the full story which was originally featured on gamrReview, read the full version here – Windforge (PC) – Review
Read more here: gamrReview
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