Cult of the Wind Review

Multiplayer shooters are usually dreadfully serious affairs with lots of menny-men being so manly with their flanking, cover firing, grenade throwing, curse-ridden kill-streaks and tactical drone-drops. If it isn’t that type of body shredding fun then we’re trying to sneak up behind our targets, slit their throats and watch dispassionately as they bleed out on the cold, hard floor of tough luck.

Cult of the Wind is as far from that as possible. It has neither the gratuitous violence like Call of Duty or Battlefield and doesn’t take the wacky humorous route like Loadout or Team Fortress. Instead it runs at 88mph and replicates those days in the past on the school playground when you and your mates pretended to be Spitfires and Messerschmitts, gunning others down in imaginary fashion.

Beautiful and idyllic design, but there’s no-one there!

Instead of gruff and burly man-bodies you take the form of a young child, running around a variety of environments. Instead of semi-automatic machine guns you hold your arms aloft and imaginary bullets fly from your hands as you wheel around the multiplayer area.



The atmosphere this creates is as refreshing as its mechanics are different. The few maps currently available feel gentle, slightly foreboding in their quiet design and potentially ruined future. There’s slight tinges of backstory littered amongst the maps too, nothing major, but enough to make you wonder about this ‘cult of the wind’’ and where they came from. Where the adults are and why are we running around all day pretending to kill each other with imaginary weapons?

Fallen aircraft litter the maps and are treated like shrines

Imaginary fuel, imaginary ammo and imaginary pickups all slot into place to create a playful experience that’s just similar enough to other online shooters and yet vastly different with its theme and design to make it unique. In each map lie real fallen planes. Their mechanical bodies broken and covered in candles like some mournful shrine to a perished titan. It’s a bizarre concoction of ideas and design that I really love to see and it’s why PC gaming is in such an exciting space right now. Unfortunately that excitement lives and dies like a Mayfly as this multiplayer gem relies on one thing it cannot deliver on - a player base.

The massive and crippling blow to the imagination of Cult of the Wind is the lack of real or imaginary friends. Launched on Steam Early Access over a month ago I was unable to get a single game with anyone until I had dragged a friend online, given them a code and played a few 1 vs. 1 matches with them. I’ve had this game for nearly three weeks to review and in all that time I’ve never seen more than one other person online with the game.

These players have long since left the game, if they were ever there at all...

With only a few official maps working (there are a few Steam Workshop designs) any experience with Cult of the Wind is a lonesome and pointless affair at this stage. There are no bots to even try out the full capabilities of the game engine or to get any sense of how good or bad this is as a game. I can’t deny that the concept appeals and I love the idea of a future generation finding fallen aircraft and believing them to be gods, not made by humans, but there’s nothing to hang that design on right now. It’s as imaginary as the weapons you fire and the fuel you run on.

This needs more work. At the very least some AI bots to give everyone who’s bought a taste of what it could be like. Hell, relaunch the thing and make it free-to-play with micro-transactions! Anything to draw some players into this unique creation. Without any community behind it I fear this will fall into the darker edges of Steam’s mighty gaming warehouse and never be seen again. It gets marks for its sheer unique design and atmosphere but there’s no reason to own this unless a concerted effort to draw in players or develop the game further is made.