If the ground based combat weren't such absolute dog$$$t, it could be a really good game. "Soulslike" apparently means YOU die in two (MAYBE three hits, if you've got armor and food buffs), where enemies take three to ten times that many of your hits. And not like, badass pirate captains with gleaming cutlasses, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ *dodo birds*. Creatures that were famous for being absolutely harmless will absolutely WRECK your ♥♥♥♥ at first level.
Not to mention that when enemies use firearms, they 100 to 0 you, no problem. Your guns will hit lower-level enemies for maybe a third their health, despite the fact that ammo (and especially in the early game, gunpowder) is a resource that you can't create on your own.
This is not to say that the combat is challenging, it's not, especially. Enemy AI is almost nonexistent: they walk into range with you and then attack. 1v1, once you see their patterns, it's easy to just dodge back or to the side and counterattack one the enemy's attack is finished, but the game doesn't give you single enemies, whoever put the maps together clumps enemies like it's your average MMO dungeon, or like they expect you to be able to put down an enemy in a few seconds.
It's not that combat is difficult, it's that combat is frustrating. Calling it 'soulslite' is an insult to Dark Souls. Dark Souls/Elden Ring combat is deliberate. Enemies hang back, circle, block and wait, and had heavy swings that were easy to dodge. Also, the player had several attack options: light and heavy attacks, kicks, and the ability to dodge or block-cancel out of (some) animations. The animation (there's only one for all one-handed melee weapons) in Windrose has terrible tracking, no cancels, and an awful hitbox that will regularly swing over the heads of boars and dodos if you fight them on a slope.
I could go on. The ground combat absolutely ruins this game.
...And the Ship combat isn't that great either. You're dropped into your first combat without any sort of introduction to how to aim cannons or maneuver, how to fight well, and so new players will be baffled, though they may be able to stumble through it. I played 2p with a friend who had played Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, and he informed me that the system was similar to that, but with significantly decreased depth and strategic options, but that the basic strategy for a player experienced with it was the same, and he was able to significantly outperform me.
Basically, I quit because I found that I didn't want to try and go out and fight enemy pirates because the combat was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, I didn't particularly want to go sink enemy ships because the Naval combat was impenetrable, and the crafting, while pretty good, will only take you so far without the other two.
In short, the developers have copied three other games that I've been able to identify (Valheim, for the crafting/construction, Dark Souls, for the ground combat, and Black Flag for naval combat), and have made a slightly worse copy of all of them. Now, copying other games, especially good ones, is fine, but seriously, the devs need to spend less time on making the game prettier (it's already pretty gorgeous, the beautiful water effects were one of my first takeaways) and more time on making their base systems feel good, especially if they're going to brag about them so much in the trailer.
Clean up the combat to be FUN and feel GOOD rather than feeling like every death being so fast you don't even have time to learn and compensate, and give some tools so that new players can figure out what the heck is going on in naval combat and I'll happily flip this thumb.
