“Co-op open world pirate survival game.” That’s a lot of exciting words packed into a single sentence, and on the back of a strong Next Fest demo in February, Windrose shot like a cannonball to the top of Steam’s most-wishlisted games. It sets to sea in early access today, but does it live up to the buzz?

I played 12 hours in the demo and another dozen in an early build of the game that’s launching today. While I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of its impressively large ocean world, I’ve got a ship full of boisterous shanty-singing crew members and I’ve been battling pirates on the high seas all weekend. Here’s an overview of Windrose based on my time with it so far.

Windrose features

What kind of survival game is Windrose?

Windrose is a co-op pirate survival game with base-building, ship-to-ship combat (with boarding), and open world exploration. After an encounter with Blackbeard leaves you shipwrecked on a tiny island, you’ve got to gather resources, craft a base, repair your ship, rescue your crew, and begin building a new pirate empire.

Here’s some of the features you may be wondering about as it launches into early access, presented as a handy checklist.

* I’ve been playing the early access build since Friday and I haven’t seen any fishing rods in crafting recipes, NPC shops, or found as loot. I haven’t even seen any fish, or fish listed as a resource in merchant contracts for animal products. The only place fishing is shown is at the end of one of the Windrose trailers—so I’m sure it’s coming, but it may not be in early access yet.

** As for farming, it seems limited to only a few crops at the moment.

My favorite feature so far in Windrose is easily the ship-to-ship combat. It’s fast and furious: don’t worry about wind direction, just try to circle your opponent and give him hell with broadsides. You won’t run out of cannonballs and you don’t need to do any physical labor to repair your ship. Did you get sunk? No biggie: just respawn it by paying a minimal lumber cost.

Ship combat has a heavy Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag vibe to it, as opposed to the more busy, hands-on experience of something like Sea of Thieves. In Windrose, you just steer and shoot and press a key to use items like repair kits. Simple, but great fun.

I’m not loving the melee combat yet, though I’ve only fought animals, zombie pirates, and some standard human enemies so far. It’s a parry system, which I don’t find particularly interesting: waiting for your opponent to strike so you can parry and strike back has already gotten a bit old.

On the plus side, those old-timey pistols and muskets are a lot of fun. You aim and shoot, but then have to continue aiming because pulling the trigger sets off a short fuse that fires the bullet a moment later. It’s been fun training myself to hold my aim even after pulling the trigger.

Windrose early access state

How ‘early’ access is it?

Windrose is intended to spend between one and three years in early access, with the developers saying it’s only got about half of the content they’d like it to have upon completion. But what’s there now is pretty darn good. The fact that you can spend a dozen hours in just the demo, which only has three islands, is pretty incredible. Even after almost 24 hours total I feel like I’ve only explored a handful of locations and have only just reached a couple of hubs with vendors and hireable NPCs.

I do have some performance problems at times, like when a new chunk of the world loads while exploring, and I got a lot of slowdowns when hosting a game with my co-worker, Wes. But it hasn’t crashed (Wes did get booted once from our session once), so while Windrose may need a bit more optimization, it does feel very stable.

Should you grab Windrose in early access?

Is Windrose worth it?

🪙 From a cost standpoint: $30 (and 10% off at launch) feels like a reasonable price considering how much time you can easily spend in just the free demo. Just keep in mind, Windrose is in early access and may be for years, so if you’re someone who blows through 80 hours of a game in a single week and then wonders why they’ve run out of content, you’re gonna have to be patient.

🏝️ From a survival standpoint: You might find yourself wishing for a bit more. The building and crafting systems are perfectly fine but don’t feel like they bring anything new to the table, and there aren’t really any hardcore survival systems like dehydration, illness, or injury, at least not yet.

🦜 From a co-op game standpoint: It doesn’t generate the goofy fun of something like Sea of Thieves but I can see it being a good hangout game for a small group of friends who want to team up for naval battles and base-building.