Hacking and slashing, hacking and slashing… and more hacking and slashing. As I was playing through this Nintendo Switch port of Windscape, developed by Magic Sandbox, that’s all I felt like I was doing. Just spamming the attack button and waiting for things to die. Oh, and waiting like several seconds at a time staring at the screen to collect stuff.
The game itself is basically a ripoff of Skyrim, but way more lackluster. As typical in these types of generic RPG’s, you start the game by waking up, as a young girl, at your parents’ house and they start yelling at you to do random chores then send you off to the abyss to do some random errand they should honestly just do themselves, and with absolutely no concern for your safety. Then it just devolves into doing random incoherent tasks for strangers and you completely forget your parents even existed, nor do they remember your existence.
The gameplay is pretty dull. You just smack things with weapons until they die. Later on you get access to ranged attacks and magic, but they take so long to charge up an attack it feels like a waste of time. You have the choice of just spamming your attacks or charging them up to do what I believe is 4x the normal damage, but it takes such a long time that I never want to. The only thing I like is how satisfying it is to just give a wolf a big ol’ whack and one-shot it. Other than that, you can go around and collect random stuff to craft things at workbenches and campfires and other things. Crafting consists of literally just pressing a big green button and waiting for it to finish. No animation. The collection of things, as I said in the introductory paragraph, is simply extremely slow and boring. You press Y and wait for the ~10 second timer to finish (and an entire ~30 seconds for a tree!). That’s it. Even Runescape has more fun mechanics for resource gathering, and I feel like that’s a pretty hard to beat.
Oh, yes, also important to note: rather than properly porting the UI to the console, they just went the lazy route and put a cursor to select UI elements. I can’t think of a single console port of a video game that has actually done this besides a couple where it sort of makes sense due to difficulty of translating the UI to console. This isn’t one of them. Especially considering that all you do in this game is press buttons in menus. The controls in general are completely awful, as well. I don’t know who in their right mind thought it would be a good idea to have the current control scheme. Jump is R, run is L, several buttons aren’t used at all… I don’t really understand why the “interact” button couldn’t have just been A or something rather than Y, considering that neither B or A are used at all in this game besides in the menus. Or use the D-pad to switch weapons faster because you have to manually equip stuff every time you face an enemy where your current setup isn’t effective.
There isn’t much to do in terms of crafting, either. I felt extremely limited as to what I could and couldn’t make, and they also weren’t that interesting. There were only three tiers of metal, and they were heavily limited as to how you could procure them. The thing that I found unique compared to other games, however, was the “mana compressor” crafting station, which you can use to craft spells with unlimited ammo. I kind of liked how there were different subtypes of melee, ranged, and magic, as well, because they reminded me of the Runescape subtypes and the different accuracies and bonuses that came with each. Though, in this game, it’s just a simple weakness to a certain subtype rather than a specific mechanic.
I don’t even want to get started on the graphics. I understand that maybe it’s a certain low-poly style that the creator was going for, but in the end, it just comes off as extremely unpolished and ugly. The character models are borderline nightmare fuel, especially the faces, and the animations are extremely buggy, and half the time the enemies don’t actually follow the character, which often allows me to kill them without taking a scratch. Not to mention that the loading screens are extremely boring: just a black screen with some kind of wind graphic in the corner that isn’t even animated.
One of the few things I did like was the music. It fit in with the theme pretty well. There were some parts where it very jarringly changed, and also some other parts that, for some reason, didn’t have music. I think it may have bugged to that regard, but honestly I have no idea.
The bosses weren’t very engaging or unique. Before I ended up giving up on the game at the part in the crypt, the same exact miniboss (some kinda skeleton mage) with the same exact mechanics was recycled three times in a row with absolutely no variation besides the graphics and how many balls of energy were being thrown at you. It just reeks of laziness.
Overall, there just isn’t that much depth to this game, and I’m not sure why the game is being sold with a $20 price tag at this point in development. I understand that it’s an early access game developed by a single person, based off what I saw on the Steam page, and thus has a long way to go in terms of actually becoming a fully-fledged game. This fact alone is what’s actually preventing me from rating the game even lower. I think this game has the potential to be a cool game if all the stuff I mentioned were changed in such a way that made the game more enjoyable and unique, along with more content, obviously. And based off what I’ve read on the store page, it definitely seems like it will have more content. I’m a big fan of skill trees, so something like that would probably bump my rating of this game up a lot. A larger variety between the different classes would be interesting as well. It’s definitely lacking that certain je ne sais quoi that comes with most RPG’s that I’ve played before, and I’m sure that with time it will fill in its own shoes. Windscape gets a 5/10 from me.
Check Out the Windscape Trailer:
Nintendo Switch Review
Video games are my passion. I've played countless games for 15+ years on various different consoles ranging many genres. Favorites are action/adventure and RPG's just because they're so immersive and I love being able to lay out a strategy for going down tech trees and looking for loot, but I'll pretty much play anything that isn't a sports game.
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