Windrose

TLDR: I wish I could recommend this game, but after 60+ hours and losing the drive to finish the story, I can't. As fans of Sea of Thieves and veterans of many other survival games, this game showed so much promise. We even played the early access. Finally we got our own server to try it out. Sadly the gameplay loop doesn't really change after you get a boat with cannons. It is a game that expects you to farm A LOT to get to a new area where you are rewarded with nothing but new versions of every material which you get to farm A LOT of. I toned down some of the settings (around 40 hours in, on "normal" mode), and it was still just unbearably repetitive and unnecessarily difficult. My party and I have played a lot of similar survival games together, and we'd all agree there are much better options. It took us some time to realize no matter how much we farmed or progressed in this game, we'd never get rewarded or some payoff for all our hard work.. Even making a brand new weapon and armor set with the brand new material from the new zone wouldn't really help you against the new threats in that area.. Ship combat is a joke, there's only so much you can do about the 8+ ships that will certainly be on top of you the moment you fight the ship you think is all by itself. Regular combat is similarly extremely difficult for no apparent reason, and the talents and finetuning you work so hard for don't seem to help much, either. I started placing a new tent (spawn) probably before every single fight on any island. I had literal hundreds across the server, easily. I love the pirate theme, the settings and the music on the Ship was amazing. The soundtrack might be the only return to this game I'll be making. I should mention the building in this game is very good, although all the cool designs or even basic things like a circular stone foundation to make a tower are locked behind roughly 30+ hours of gameplay. We got some really cool foundation building sets WAAAAY late into the game in the last few areas, and it's like... what do you expect me to do with this at this point? It's a small gripe among a long list of weird stuff about this game. The building mechanic itself is good though, and I like how this game encourages decoration. Maybe this is messed up to add, but we immediately switched our server to a Runescape Dragonwilds server and have had a much much better time on that game.

A mid game that hasn't received any content or impactful updates in half a year. Don't buy it until there's an update that improves the ♥♥♥♥ combat, awful naval battles, and boring building.

SLOW starting slog, but it really picks up once you get your first ship. Quite a lot here for early access.

Great game! Best pirate game in a while, just the pvp feels to hard even at a normal difficulty.

“领导您怎么拿着那么好的武器？”

The premise is excellent, and I genuinely like the idea of a pirate-themed survival game. Unfortunately, after around 10 hours, the experience has become repetitive rather than engaging. Combat quickly settles into the same pattern of swing, dodge, swing, repeat. While that might be acceptable in the opening hours, I haven't seen anything that suggests the core gameplay will evolve significantly in the mid or late game. Progression also feels too slow. It takes far too long to reach the point where you finally get a ship, and when you do, it's underwhelming. Ship combat feels sluggish and clunky, lacking the excitement you'd expect from a pirate game. Boarding actions are particularly disappointing. They simply reuse the same land-combat mechanics but squeeze them into a confined space. On top of that, friendly AI often gets in the way, blocking movement and making dodging frustrating rather than challenging. I kept telling myself that these issues were just part of the early-game grind and that things would improve once more systems unlocked. However, after 10 hours, I'm struggling to find a reason to continue, and I genuinely wish I could refund it.

Yes Windrose is recommended by me

Would get my butt kicked by a dodo once again.