I finished Wind Forge using mucho-grande hackery (1000 Vulcan steel ignots? why yes, please). The game is Terraria-like but it isn't no Terraria. Namely, it lacks the refinement and polish that Terraria has. I have four main gripes:
1) I decided to be a pirate. Well, not really a pirate because they shoot first, but in trying to seize their ships can deconstruct them for salvage, more and more attacking ships came. I think in total, there was three plus a whale. When a forth spawned and started pelting me with bullets, I "NOPED" on out of there. I have no idea why the AI decided to pepper me and that spot with hostiles. It makes no sense. That wasn't the only incident either. It just seems to like to RNG enemies and there isn't much rhyme or reason to the logic behind it (in Terraria, they always spawn outside of the visible area according to the biome).
2) The game has a lot of "temples" which are guarded by a boss. The temples can be described quite simply:
2a) Layout is a maze and the maze generally only has one path to the cheese boss.
2b) There's vases to break which usually just have some ammo. There's also 2 or 3 dead ends which have a chest--usually with fairly minor loot. The only major loot is from the boss itself.
2c) There's platforms, doors, hatches, and walls.
2d) Other than the boss, there's only two types of hostiles: implaced turrets make up the bulk of them and human guards. The turrets usually attack the guards and the turrets win so... If you have a good gun and ammo, you can kill the turrets in one spray/blast so often, they can't even get a shot off.
2e) The most interesting part of the temples is that, after you loot the boss, the temple itself does something unique in response. Some spam spike traps on all of the floors. Some turn their walls into explosive blocks that go boom with very little damage. Some turn to sand and collapse. You always had to think ahead about what would be the best way to escape. This is really the only thing notable about temple design.
Basing temple design off a maze where most paths are dead ends was a poor game design choice.
3) No fast travel. The main story often sends you across the map for this or that. Transit between cities gets tediuous.
4) Framerate tanked in places, especially when fulling exploring a temple. It's like the game was trying to render all of the areas that the fog of war was removed on even if it was far off perspective.
I think I would give the game 3/5. It's not terrible but it is not fantastic either.
Been playing "Oxygen Not Included" since. I think I'm on my sixth or seventh attempt because I don't like my layout for one reason or another. I wish the game had tutorials like Facterio has. The fact it has none means a lot of trial and error. So far I'm liking it but I'm finding aspects of it intimidating like storage. Game doesn't want you to just build a storage tank like Facterio; it wants you to build inlets and outlets where storage is structural like Terraria. I don't particularly have a problem with that but, again, no tutorials. I have to try (and fail) to figure out what each of these storage structures need and find a place for them.
