There is so much risk to designing a game that is only going to be fun with online multiplayer. Cliffy B's project Lawbreakers is a textbook example of that. But that risk is also equally displayed in a little indie pirate game like "Windward".

Windward is a naval role-playing game where you start off with what might as well be a canoe with a slingshot tied to it, and work your way up the ranks to having a flying death machine. You do small quests and trade goods between towns to level up and acquire resources. Fight some dastardly pirates, trade some wool, and there you go you're playing the game. It's sort of reminiscent of the Elite Dangerous or Euro Truck Simulator model of game design, but a lot easier.

Gameplay

The thing is, I don't think the game is very good. The combat is insipid. Face your side to the enemy you want to shoot and the game automatically shoots. You can use some extra skills like flaming barrels and chain shots, but it's really not all that exciting. Not helping matters is the AI that was apparently dropped during development. You'll be fighting 10 dreadnaughts off while defending a town, look at the map and notice all of your AI teammates sitting around healing one lighthouse together.

Even if you wanted to avoid the fights and just do quests for the towns, those are frequently bugged where you'll get two quests asking you to go to the same town and only one of them will be completed, while you just have to abandon the other one.

There's also zero skill to the trading. Hover over a resource to see what towns need it. Buy it and go to those towns. You don't need to guess anything, you don't need to game the market, you don't need to think. It's all such a mindless experience with a gameplay loop that's only slightly more fun than that of "Sea of Thieves".

The Multiplayer

So if the entirety of the gameplay is god awful, why do I have 75 hours clocked in on Steam? Well, the multiplayer really does save the experience, honestly. With a party of thinking human beings, liberating areas from pirate control can actually be really fun. Telling your friends to hold off the pirates for a few more seconds while you capture a town across the map. Screaming and begging each other to throw water barrels, and flaming each other when they somehow miss and get everyone killed.

Progression is also saved by having friends around, since some of you can commit to dealing damage, being tanky, or filing a support role, so you can share equipment with each other that helps those certain roles more, therefore advancing all of you through the game faster and making it less monotonous.

Multiplayer is also pretty much mandatory for end-game content. I don't really get what the idea here was, but there are these raids where you need to kill a dragon to get the best equipment in the game, but if you try to fight this thing alone, you will die seven times over before you can even fire a single shot off. So loners literally can't beat the game.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem if the multiplayer servers weren't ghost-towns right now. Last year, three of my friends and I played on a server together and had an absolute blast. Obviously, none of us play this thing anymore because there was no more content after the dragon.

Conclusion

Windward is a very flawed game that is salvageable only in a multiplayer environment that it no longer has. It is a cheap indie title, so maybe the pirate theme and ship combat is worth the price for you. The game has little to no value as a single-player experience, but if you can convince 2-3 of your friends to play it together, it can lead to some good times.