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Windbound Free Download GAMESPACK.NET Washed ashore on a remote island with nothing but a knife and my wits to protect me, I was immediately grabbed by Windbound’s opening moments. In this seafaring adventure you must harvest materials and craft tools to keep main character Kara alive as she navigates through a series of procedurally generated archipelagos in her search for the other surviving members of her tribe. Unfortunately, the combination of exhausting survival mechanics and a paper-thin plot meant that neither the voyage nor the destination proved to be worth the time and effort. Windbound takes an intriguing premise and completely blows it. A gorgeous painterly aesthetic gives the impression that Windbound could be set somewhere off the coast of Hyrule, but that’s largely where comparisons with The Legend of Zelda end. While it does feature a lead character with an insatiable appetite for smashing pots, Windbound otherwise lacks the dungeons, environmental puzzles, flexible combat, or boss fights typically found in one of Link’s legendary adventures. Instead, Windbound leans hard into a survival-based grind that makes Breath of the Wild’s breakable weapons seem like little more than a minor inconvenience.TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

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Before you begin the adventure you’re instructed that the ‘Survivalist’ difficulty setting is ‘the full Windbound experience’, and so that’s exactly what I chose to play it on. Survivalist strips you of most of your inventory and returns you to the beginning each time Kara perishes, and I found those high roguelike stakes made me particularly careful about which beasts to engage with and which craftable objects to prioritise as I made my way from one island to the next. There’s a fairly extensive crafting system at Kara’s disposal, as almost everything in her surroundings – from grass and sticks to animal bones and hides – can be gathered and converted into rudimentary tools like shovels and hammers or enhancements to her boat in order to make sailing speedier. But aside from a basic boat and perhaps a sharpened stick to defend yourself with, none of it feels particularly essential. You can play all the way through Windbound’s story existing on a pacifist’s diet of mushrooms, avoiding all enemies and not making a single modification to your canoe. There aren’t any creatures of significance that force you to strengthen Kara’s combat capabilities in order to overcome them, nor are there particular stormy seas that require extensive boat upgrades to cross. There’s all this crafting to do in Windbound, but no compelling reason to bother with any of it.

Uncover the Secrets Within.

In fact, the most persistent threat in Windbound isn’t the deadly inhabitants of its islands nor the turbulence of its waters; it’s the rumbling of Kara’s stomach. Windbound’s hunger meter constantly nags at you to drop anchor at every landmass you see in order to search for food, a search that can frequently prove futile when the procedurally generated island you manage to land at has no procedurally generated flora or fauna to eat. Worse still, any food you carry with you is often likely to spoil before you need to eat it. Indeed, starvation proved to be the direct cause of the majority of my deaths early in Windbound as I got to grips with its systems. Still, I was otherwise content to play on the Survivalist setting – that is, until midway through the fourth chapter when, with a full bar of health and a recently topped-up hunger meter, I was suddenly killed by a single hit from a shark-like beast that charged my boat in the middle of the ocean; quite literally out of the blue. The next thing I knew I was waking up on the shore at the beginning of the first chapter, some six or seven hours of progress washed away like a sand castle in a rising tide.Persona 4 Golden Switch NSP

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This abrupt and seemingly unavoidable demise left a salty taste in my mouth that had nothing to do with swallowing too much seawater, and needless to say after that I switched the difficulty to ‘Storyteller’ and kept it there for the remainder of my Windbound playthrough. Windbound isn’t the sailing-focused spin on Zelda: Breath of the Wild that some trailers suggested, but it’s not entirely removed from those comparisons, either. Its best asset is its sense of adventure. As Kara, a shipwrecked warrior, you’ll hunt for resources, craft tools like a bow and a glider, and try your best to work with – not against – the wind to explore procedurally-generated archipelago world maps. I adore that premise, and if you’re into the sound of a boat game that’s about sailing instead of combat, you’ll like it too. I just wish some of the edges weren’t so rough and the structure felt more engaging. I didn’t quite know what I was getting into with Windbound, so that point about the format is worth stressing upfront. This an action-adventure roguelike, which may be a deal-breaker for some of you. Windbound is split up into five chapters, each of which plays out essentially the same way.

Live Off The Land.

You’ll begin with a circular grayed-out map that you can fill in by sailing around, and along the way – assuming you don’t get too side-tracked by optional islands that might bring new crafting possibilities – you’ll need to locate three towers, scale them, and activate them. From there, you can head to the map’s lone (but hard-to-miss) shrine, teleport to a recurring dreamlike space for a bit of Journey-style storytelling, and ride some massive waves in a sort of linear trial before you’re whisked away to the next chapter. Each chapter is functionally the same, except the map sizes grow larger, the islands start to look and feel more distinct, and the creatures become a bit more threatening, though combat never seems like Windbound‘s priority. With that said, definitely play on Storyteller difficulty, not Survivalist – the latter will kick you back to Chapter 1 if you die and you’ll lose a big chunk of your inventory. Meanwhile, Storyteller lets you retain all items and try again on the current chapter. One death was plenty for me. You can go as fast or slow as you like, which I liked, but you’ll contend with a hunger-based penalty to your stamina bar if you aren’t diligent. The good news: you can cook food on your boat (assuming you bulk it up to fit more items, which you’re never forced to).NBA 2K12

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The bad news: cooking meat is super slow. While certain videos paint a grand picture, in practice, there’s a lot of repetition – for better and for worse. I never felt truly lost in Windbound, not even for a second, but with such a rote structure to follow on the critical story path, my discoveries stopped feeling personally meaningful after a while. It was cool to find a recipe for a magical bow or investigate hard-to-make-out rock formations way out there for shards to upgrade Kara’s passive abilities. It was less cool to semi-mindlessly stab the same old beasts on the same old islands to stock up my food reserves. The initial exhilaration wore off quickly. I dig almost everything to do with sailing in Windbound, from building my boat up bit by bit, to adjusting sails to mesh with the ever-shifting winds, to seeing a hazy far-off island come into focus, but dang, I do not care for the melee combat, dodge-rolls, or on-foot movement. Those elements are all passable. And despite the existence of a fun glider, verticality ends up being a non-factor. You won’t climb much at all. Playing as Kara, it is your task to negotiate a fairly barren sea dotted with small islands each inhabited by a very small handful of monsters. Remember the likes of Windfall Island, Dragon Roost Island, and the rest from Wind Waker?

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They were bustling with characterful towns and memorable NPCs which made every single player miss them once they sailed away aboard the King of Red Lions. There’s nothing of the sort in Windbound – it’s a bland, forgettable experience hampered by the vacuous nature of its procedurally-generated islands. You have to harvest materials in order to fashion weapons and other tools, most notably your boat, which you must then hop aboard to sail without a set destination in the hope that an island appears on the horizon. That’s the thing with the exploration – with a totally unpopulated map to begin with, you must slowly negotiate the sea in order to find out what’s around. The circumference of the map for each level isn’t massive, but commanding the boat is painfully slow, enough to make it seem as wide as Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule. Harvest enough materials from the islands and you’ll be able to craft other items, the most notable of which is, of course, the boat, which you can later craft sails and other add-ons for. Prior to your addition of a sail, you hold the ZR button to painstakingly drift from island to island. But unlike in Wind Waker, where adding the sail makes your ship an absolute bastion of the seas,

in Windbound you have to worry about loosening and tightening the sail and have to do a really irritating zig-zagging sailing motion in order to contend with the wind that is blowing the wrong way.  It’s really a cheap way of padding out the game’s run time, and it really serves to distract that there’s not much to be getting on with anyway. That’s because each level centres on finding three islands on the map which have towers that must be activated to generate a staircase on the final island, used to ascend to the goal. Some lesser islands may have stones which can up your base health bar, your base stamina bar, or blue crystal-like things which can be spent on upgrades and abilities at the end of each level. But each level was a rinse and repeat of that formula – sail around and find the towers before ascending the steps – and never before has the boredom set in quicker. The survival aspect of Windbound is one of the major factors that make this game such a chore. Combat is very limited and infrequent but is awkward – there’s no satisfying locking-on sense, and throwing projectiles can prove to be very wayward. But you don’t even need to engage in fighting for your stamina to drop, and that’s an inexplicable pain in the ass. Imagine if every fifteen minutes in Wind Waker you had to find a bathroom for Link to find some relief? It’s the same premise. Not fun at all.

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And with all that promise, and the beautiful Zelda-inspired visuals, it’s a shame that this is such a dull experience. I kept an open mind on the survival elements, hoping they would be counter-balanced with mystery and adventure. They were both in short supply throughout. Scavenge the islands’ untamed terrain for resources that you can use to craft a full range of tools and weapons to hunt wildlife and upgrade your boat. You must set sail when resources become scarce. Your boat is your key companion on this journey, carefully craft your own custom sailing vessel to take on the treacherous waters, traversing from one island to the next. Design your boat to battle tempestuous winds, monstrous waves, and deadly sea creatures.” Shipwrecked alone on an uncharted island, explore, adapt and navigate the land and perilous seas to stay alive. As Kara, you are a warrior, caught at sea in a fierce storm, adrift from your tribe. Thrown from your boat, at the mercy of the turbulent waters, you are tossed on to the shores of the Forbidden Islands, a mysterious paradise. With no boat, no food or tools, just the will and skill to survive, uncover this beautiful island’s rich resources. Craft tools and weapons to hunt and defend yourself against nature itself with its wild and fantastical creatures. Whilst exploring further islands and the scattered ruins across their lands, secrets of the past and glimpses of the future are revealed. Unravel the mystery behind them all and you may find more than just your way home.The Captain Switch NSP

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