Welcome to our review of Windscape, an action adventure game taking us back to the Nintendo 64 era!
Windscape is a first-person exploration action-adventure full of exciting challenges. Its unique art style is reflected in expansive worlds and their bizarre inhabitants. On your journey, you will find dark caves, ancient ruins, and mysterious woods. By exploring the beautiful game world, mining resources and fighting epic monsters you collect numerous materials that can be used to craft items, weapons, and armor.
You will travel across four unique islands as Ida, a young girl leaving the safety of her parents’ home for the first time. Find out about the secrets of the islands and make your way through challenging puzzles and thrilling boss encounters.
Prepare for your enemies by changing your weapons: Use the magic of fire and ice, the brute force of a powerful mace or one of the many other weapons to overcome every tough situation. Should you need some healing or additional resistance against certain kinds of damage you can prepare stews and potions beforehand to always keep the upper hand.
You are now ready to embark on the adventure called Windscape and yes, it is quite elaborate in both approach to graphics and storyline. Let us start with the graphics, these polygon shaped humanoids reminisce immediately to the era of the Nintendo 64! The appeal is cute but at the same time, with a semi filled world and preset paths to cross, this game has that full old school feeling for real!
Storywise, you are playing in true first person as a female lead character. She is easy to control and with some minor annoyances in the menus, you won’t really have many issues with her. The menus can be called “small” and as I tend to prefer handheld mode, I had to hold up the console up to my head a few times.
Combat is quite easy though I must say, the smaller enemies are in shrill contrast with the bigger enemies, my first run-in with the “boss” in the mine, I had to attack him with a hit and run strategy, which took its time to complete as he had ample health and his bombs did its fair share of damage. I hate being a coward in battles, but it was the way to get it done and over with.
There are some glitches in the game, I got a great screenshot of an enemy walking underneath stairs in a place without footing. There is the time that I was in the mine and the port to the boss fight had three switches that needed to be activated, but I was able to enter after just 2 switches had been made. Kind of funny, but yeah, you get the point.
Windscape is a big game, so a lot of things can be done and explored. The main quests are always shown on the small map as their direction shows. I absolutely loved this part, it just feels right to have a feature like this on a big game like Windscape.
Downsides to the game are the awkward difficulty balances at times. I mentioned these before, but there are some others that were incredibly hard. At times, the game may feel slow when you are traveling between places, this mostly because on Switch, you need to keep the running thumbstick pressed down. At times, I just moved the thumbstick to the right direction, but it prevented our heroine from running and she just strutted along the way. A minor annoyance.
In conclusion, Windscape is quite the adventure and has been compared to some of the bigger action adventure titles, but not for me, I look at it as it is and I did enjoy it but not enough for a top score. Those minor annoyances and glitches did end up taking a half point down of the initial 9 score.
