Windblown Review

Windblown is an amazing action roguelike game by the makers of Dead Cells. It can be played in singleplayer mode as well as with 2 others, through random lobbies or with friends. It has no missable achievements.

Keep in mind that the following stats are for the current game and with it being in early access, I find it highly likely that new achievements will be added later on.
Approximate amount of time to 100%: 10h+
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: It is a roguelike, so multiple times because that is part of the gameplay loop
Is there a good guide available: You don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Maybe, one achievement is a real grind or bugged. The achievement for buying 30 gifts.
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can play on the easiest difficulty and still unlock everything
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: See “grinding achievements”

In Windblown you will fight enemies and collect resources during a run to unlock buffs and items for future runs. The buffs like having an extra health potion, or doing more damage will be there every future run. The items you can buy have a chance to spawn in future runs, but you never know which ones will come up in a run.

I’m blown away by how good Windblown feels to play. Dashing around in the world feels so good and killing enemies is a lot of fun. The first thing that I noticed when this game was announced were the screenshots. The game is beautiful! When I started the game for the first time I was also pleasantly surprised by the music, while in most games I don’t really notice the music.

As stated above, you never know what shows up in the next run as it comes to temporary buffs and weapons. I wish there was something like “role selection” of some sort, as I much prefer the ranged weapons over the melee weapons. This would also be helpful when forming an online group, to have each their own role, but I can also see why they didn’t add something like that. As it has it charm to have to deal with what you got. I just felt bad for random team members who had to deal we me when I was in a run where I couldn’t utilize the ranged weapons, as my gameplay is a lot worse without those.

I’m very impressed about is the number of buffs in the game, there are like 80 or so temporary buffs (aka gifts) that you can collect during that run and can have a total of 3 active (in the beginning, this number will increase with unlocks). Having so many will also mean you will not always have a nice combo, but it makes it that when you have a great combo it feels even better.

I have been struggling with the difficulty that quickly ramped up in this game. However, I can totally be that being a skill issue as I have encountered amazing players who flew through the game. In singpleplayer I always struggle on the end boss of the second biome and onward from that point.

I have only encountered 1 bug while playing Windblow for almost 14 hours. In multiplayer, I sometimes lost my interface where you see the chat from the party, as well as your and the others health (+potions). Not knowing your own health is quite a challenge as you also have no idea when you need to heal and with no chat you can’t tell your team members that you can’t see your own health. Gladly this was always fixed after the group died or sometimes randomly during a run. I think I saw this bug like 5 times or so within 30 online runs.

The achievements in Windblow are for 90% just for beating every miniboss and end boss of each biome. This can be done in both singleplayer as well as multiplayer. There are 2 other achievements, one for buying 5 different weapon unlocks, and one for buying 30 gifts (aka temporary buff unlocks). You buy those with items you find during your runs. The one for 30 gifts maybe a bit bugged or just grindy. It is hard to tell as you start with some gifts already, so no idea how many you need so you have bought 30 gifts but it seems to unlock somewhere between having 60 to 80 gifts unlocked. To get there is quite the grind in the case it isn’t a bug that this number is so high. Gladly in multiplayer runs everybody gets the same amount of those resources, so you don’t have to fight over those.

I give Windblown 4,5 out of 5 stars and I can’t wait to see how this game will grow and turn out around the 1.0 release!

This review for Windblown was written on 1 November 2024, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 16 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.