Everwind

I can't recommend this game in its current state. It has a good premise: fly around with your custom built ship and explore various islands and dungeons. Voxel vehicles is what we wished to have in other voxel games for a very long time. The ship also doubles as your base which is a plus. Me and my brother thought positively about the game at the beginning. However, the game currently has pacing and balancing issues that worsen the experience: Some resources are extremely difficult to obtain and you are perpetually forced to look for them if you try to interact with systems that need them, like magic and alchemy. Some resources are also tied to something specific like biomes or creatures, so good luck. If you play coop, the resources you find are split among the party leaving you with even less resources per player. The food and farming system is underwhelming, needy, and unusable in most cases. The better food you cook will basically only give you flat increased healing or stamina regeneration and nothing else. You aren't rewarded for crafting specific foods with certain buffs. Requirement for food though is necessary if you tend to get hit sometimes as it's the only health regeneration mechanic in the game (besides health potions), so you are required to spend resources on food or potions, and the higher your max health is the harder it is to heal it up with cheaper/more common resources. The farming mechanic stops you from exploring further up which makes little sense considering what the goal of the game is. The upgrade to let you do this is rarer than winning the lottery apparently so farming on-ship was not obtainable throughout my playtime and we had to forage for food all the time. Third, the skill trees are borderline cosmetic. There are only a few meaningful skills to get like the parry mechanic, but other than that you will encounter meaningless skills that won't help you 80-90% of the time. The upgrade station doesn't specify this but each upgrade has a chance to give you a small stat boost beside the fixed main stats upgrade (e.g. damage, armour), but those stats are usually too small to be perceived (e.g. +2-5% crit chance. Potions also suffer from low percentages). Better armour and equipment is locked into 5 separate skills points (armour, melee, ranged, magic, mining) so it's hard to switch once you commit. One advanced equipment type I have never saw in my playtime was the advanced mining equipment. There are no quests beyond the first few like the tutorial island. While yes, it's an exploration game, but it could have helped in cases where we would end up discovering the same things, dud islands with the most common of resources for hours on end. Even just directing us to advance into the game (like the aforementioned farming gear) would have helped a lot if we started to lose the fun in exploration. The above is criticism can be fixed, and I hope the developers do make some changes on full release.