At the beginning of Windward, you're presented with four factions to choose from. In Tasharen Entertainment's maritime action/exploration game, these factions represent the four styles of play Windward nominally offers: exploration, combat, trading, and diplomacy (read: questing). In the game's yawn-inducing first hour, that may seem like an apt description for the potential in the procedurally generated world set in front of you. But as you sink more time into Windward, its similarities to drops you into a massive forest and invites you to get lost and engage in exceptionally subtle environmental storytelling. Windward gives you bland chains of islets and an ocean, and you're never without a handy course direction effect telling you where to go. An entire faction of the game has no reason to exist because it represents a meaningless portion of the Windward experience.

Combat exists to break up the monotony of the other three core mechanical loops in the game, but it gets stuck in its own rote monotony. It takes a couple of hours for your ship to get any combat capabilities beyond circling around your enemy, auto-firing, and waiting for the cooldown on your volley shot to refresh. That's dull but fair for the singular ships you encounter at the beginning of the game, but once you encounter more ships in the game's second area--Windward's admittedly massive world maps are broken down into significantly smaller chunks--success in ship combat becomes an arbitrary question of "will the game send more ships at me than I can possibly handle" until you get more upgrades. Conquering towns involves dropping anchor in a circle outside a port for a nominal period of time.

That feeds into Windward's most perfidious sin. Even if you decide you're really into Windward's exploration, trading, or questing, you can't properly engage in them without sinking a lot of time into combat once you reach the second area. Trading is totally blocked off until you've kicked all the pirates out of any given region. And pirates spawn rapidly in Windward, and they’ll take over towns if you lose your vigilance for even a second. Windward doesn’t give you the necessary tools to properly defend regions you've secured from pirates, leading to a constant hit and run. Even if you don’t engage in the game's combat, it still becomes the only element of the game you can interact with.

The opening portions of Winward have you falling asleep at your computer; later areas have you cursing angrily as every small victory you win is erased by the overzealous enemy AI (aided by utterly complacent allies content to watch town after town fall to pirates). The promise of exploring Windward's world as you see fit is a false one, and Windward never earns its sea legs.