Windbound essentially borrows this one mission and runs with it. When The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker released in 2002, one of the many varied missions involved you discovering three islands that yielded the three beacons of the Triforce, and once all three were activated, you had your final objective.
#Windbound map series
Having established this, and with Shigeru Miyamoto's masterpiece series firmly out of my mind, I tried to push forward with Windbound-but whilst sailing towards a small, pot-laden island and hauling anchor to dredge items out of the sea, I had an overbearing flashback.
#Windbound map simulator
Essentially this is a survival simulator dressed as a toon shaded RPG, with so much promise and so little to actually do.
If you think that it is clearly a Wind Waker clone, it definitely takes more than a few beats from the seminal title, but it most certainly doesn't come close it's not the same game at all. If you believe that it has a Breath of the Wild vibe, it sort of does in a visual way, but not in terms of content or possibilities. If you think you have seen this game somewhere before, or that it borrows from a certain green-garbed franchise: you are absolutely correct. Let us address the elephant in the room to fully understand what Windbound is and what it absolutely is not.
The input method didn't convey the visual layouts look and feel, and the disparity was infuriating.
Once or twice sure, but every, single, time!? I had to press the R1 button to click on the left menu page, it cycles from the left panel to the right, the right panel to the left, but my brain said to hit the left equivalent to go left, and so I dropped in and out of the wrong menus, far too frequently. I found myself huffing and puffing in mild disbelief that I could fail to navigate the menus every damned time. The menu system is oddly unintuitive too, with a muddle of bumper and trigger combinations required to navigate each page. You hit the R1 button to navigate from the left panel of options for crafting to the right panel of items that you are carrying. Weapons such as spears and bows can also be augmented with further refinements, such as metal parts, and damage modifiers such as poisonous inflexion or the ability to cause beasts to bleed out when struck. For example, at the very beginning you have the knowledge to make a sling, but require certain parts before you can make one, whereas other recipes reveal themselves as you pick up new resources.
#Windbound map upgrade
From here you have the option to build onto your boat extra items such as storage baskets, decks, sails and effectively upgrade it to a kind of kitted-out wooden catamaran.Ĭrafting, in general, is largely an obvious affair, with a menu brought up with the R1 trigger, and a selection of recipes to make items depending on your current holdings. Alas, it only requires you to turn grass into rope and bundles then, in turn, craft bundles of rope into a basic canoe. I figured to make a boat I would need wood, but I couldn't cut down trees without an axe, which to be crafted, ironically required wood and a tougher, sharper ingredient. Close to me, across a very small stretch of water, was a second island, slightly bigger in scale and more intriguing than the last, purely because there were big girthy trees and I could see things moving around, live targets, something for me to slash to pieces in the hopes of finding leather, meat and bone.
Having collected more grass and rocks that I could feasibly carry, I was ready to ditch this limited little rocky grass filled starting island and get into something meatier. You begin with a simple knife which you can slash with via the Square button, you can Jump with Cross, run with Circle or 元, and Triangle is your action button. Where did you come from, what happened, and who the heck are you? Armed with an obvious quest to find my way off the island from which I began, my outset island if you will, I started rifling through the menus to figure out my abilities and upgrades. Starting out, you know that you have been shipwrecked and washed ashore-any more than that is left rather vague.