Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered (PS5)
As of late, I’ve been eager to find a good example of a horse riding game, but after playing awful experiences like The Unicorn Princess and Horse Club Adventures, I’ve become a bit nervous about seeking out another title in the genre. However, Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered has something those two titles didn’t have that gave me some hope. This particular horse riding game is, after all, a remaster, meaning not only was it deemed a smart idea to rerelease the game after presumably some initial interest and success, but this would be a chance to clean up any issues it might have had back during its first release where it originally went by Windstorm: The Game.
The subtitle “Start of a Great Friendship” isn’t technically new to this remaster, but while it might seem like it indicated an origin point for the story of how the game’s main character Mika meets the black stallion known as Windstorm, this game actually takes place after they’ve already bonded and overcome some early struggles. While this is a remake of the first game in the series, Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered actually is a tie-in to the larger fiction series known as Ostwind in Germany, of which there are quite a few films and books. This video game takes place around a year after the initial time Mika and Windstorm spent together, the game referencing past events like when Mika learned of the horse’s distaste for riding competitions, but there are also references to previous plots like some abused horses they helped free. Not too much knowledge is required to understand the fairly light tale told in this adventure though despite it being more a continuation of an ongoing friendship if anything, your objectives in this game fairly small in scale as you help Mika’s friends and family around the stable she’s returned to for the summer. At best, there is a brief stretch of the adventure where the Kaltenbach Estate where this game takes place is at risk of going bankrupt and Mika and Windstorm need to step out their comfort zone a bit to attract customers, but otherwise the story tasks are fairly light and breezy bits of training or assisting with rural tasks. The English voice acting isn’t anything exceptional but some effort was put into making it sound mostly natural, only a rare line or bit of text hinting at the developers being a German studio.
The riding in Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered is straightforward but effective, the player never playing as anything but Mika atop Windstorm. The story’s point in time does mean the two are already pretty confident and trust in each other, there being no period where Windstorm might resist you save for if you flub a jump and he takes control so he can properly leap over the obstacle. Generally, riding involves the management of Windstorm’s stamina. You can have your horse walk at a few different speeds, but even a gallop won’t drain Windstorm’s energy. Holding down a button to sprint will though, Windstorm moving at max speed for as long as you do so. Sprinting energy will regenerate gradually the minute you release the button, meaning a good deal of speed focused challenges are about properly identifying how hard to ride Windstorm without tiring him. It’s not a complex system, but the wilderness around Kaltenbach Estate can have some winding roads or natural barriers you need to work your way around that ask you to be smart about when riding at max speed, but jumping can have a few issues.
Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered uses a jumping system where you can press a button to leap over obstacles like fences or you can get yourself down from a small outcropping, the game generally fairly smart about letting you cut corners with some smart jumps while making sure it mostly places invisible walls in places like dense forest or near dangerous jumps that would be believably dangerous to traverse. However, the game can be a bit overzealous in determining if you missed the jump. If Windstorm were to potentially have his body land on a fence for example, the game will quickly pop up a very short loading screen before teleporting him back a few feet. This does feel like a reasonable failsafe for a bad jump without taking away the player’s freedom, but sometimes you can see Windstorm land perfectly fine but the game misjudges it and throws you back a bit anyway. On the bright side, such jumping issues usually only arise when you’ve taken some initiative, the races and other tasks in the story never requiring you to do these kind of risky jumps to clear the goals it lays out. Instead, it relies on the game’s second type of jump. When approaching a larger obstacle like a hurdle or fallen tree, a meter will briefly appear and an indicator moves up it. Press the jump button in time with the indicator being in the green section, and you’ll not only do the jump, but you’ll get all of your stamina refilled. Jumping at all before it’s too late at least clears the hurdle, but mess up and you’ll have the slow and sometimes fiddly situation where Windstorm tries to back up and do it himself, this sometimes a death sentence for some of the game’s more demanding late game trials where time is rather tight. However, the stamina restoring element also pairs well with the fact the speed at which you approach a jump and angle influence how fast that meter indicator moves. You might want to slow a bit to make the jump easier, and if you know there’s a jump coming up, you can decide to push Windstorm closer to running out of stamina in the hopes you can get that big refill. The relationship between the jump meter and stamina ends up the right bit of complication to make the riding more involved than just pointing your horse in the right direction, there being just enough thought required to make it accessible for young players but not hollow for more experienced ones.
Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered concocts a decent range of activities for you to tackle as Mika and Windstorm. There are some expected horse riding challenges such as checkpoint races to test your speed and some smaller but jump heavy races to see how well you manage the jump meter, but there are some tasks that aren’t all about speed. There can be times where you need to locate something like plants harmful to horses and collect them in the allotted time, there are little hunts for photogenic locations near the estate where you’ll be given a clue and a general area but not the exact location of what you’re looking for, and some missions where you need to successfully ride alongside a horse or animal for a bit to catch them. You can retry missions if you fail, some don’t even have timers, and your reward will usually be experience points that will eventually let you level up Windstorm’s attributes, although it can be hard to feel the impact of some of them besides the boosts to his stamina. Initially, the game does a pretty good job of mixing together the objective types, placing them in different areas, or adding small conditions like one little search where you need to find the black and white spotted cow Frau Holle as she hides amidst other cows.
Eventually though, Frau Holle will become the bane of your existence.
The mission type where you need to ride alongside an animal for three full seconds to catch them is initially a nifty concept, a bit of a twist on a race where you have an active target to pursue. If you get too close too early, sometimes they’ll get a burst of speed that shows the game isn’t ready for you to catch them too quickly, but it’s not too egregious at first. When your max speed, max stamina, sprinting Windstorm starts to struggle to catch the incredibly speedy dairy cow Frau Holle repeatedly later in the adventure though, things start to get irritating. The game starts to lean on the catching missions far too often, Frau Holle not always the star but at least sometimes when it’s another horse it can tie into one of the small ongoing stories like meeting up with a horse you rescued in a previous Ostwind adventure. Frau Holle though, the characters just shrug and say she’s run off again, and while it’s a little cute the first few times, it starts to become grating as the game crams so many of this mission type together. Much of the time you’re chasing after them with the game outright not allowing you to catch them early, and if the animal gets too far ahead, you’ll automatically lose the mission and need to retry. Since the path isn’t initially clear like a checkpoint race, the animal can bolt in an unexpected direction or lose you over a jump you didn’t expect, and even worse, there is a limit for how long the chase can go before you automatically lose even if you’re literally about to capture them finally. These also don’t mix well with one feature of the controls, that being the camera won’t update properly based on the direction you’re facing, meaning even when you’re turning your horse you sometimes can’t see where you’re going until you let go of the sprint button to adjust the camera with the right stick, all but ensuring your quarry can take a sudden turn and escape your grasp. These missions go from difficult but interesting challenges to repetitive and frustrating, and weirdly enough, the game suddenly introduces a new mission type where you need to balance on small beams while riding and then never uses it again while it’s content to then start running capture missions into the ground afterwards.
Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered does have some challenges like collecting dropped apples that do eventually take on some more demanding forms in the late game without being so rough in design, but some issues that were bubbling under the surface start to become hard to ignore as the game stops throwing the easier and simpler content at you. Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered can be a bit glitchy with your horse sometimes ending up doing odd things like standing vertically, and while other tasks don’t get as bad as hunting down Frau Holle repeatedly, they can end up instead being too basic to really struggle with or drag on because you’re looking for something in a large area that can sometimes blend in too easily with the scenery.
The remaster has definitely made its natural areas look nice in many parts save for a particularly choppy waterfall that perhaps was best not to direct you towards for a photo challenge, and if the story missions get you down, you can at least start engaging in some free riding. The entire area around the Kaltenbach Estate is available for riding around in just for the sake of it, but there are things to find scattered around. 120 horse carvings sit around the map as a little collectible to find, some plants and curious locations can be found by poking around, and you can ride down some hiking trails if you can follow the signs well enough. It’s freedom but with little bits of purpose if you are looking for something to do beyond just riding, although missions can be found on occasion in the free riding area. Normally they appear in a menu back at the stable, but the ones out in the world have an annoying feature where sometimes failing them kicks you out of the mission and you have to talk to whoever provided the mission all over again to retry, pausing mid-mission not giving you a retry option either. Unsurprisingly, this does not gel well with the catching missions. There is some horse grooming to do as well, cleaning Windstorm’s hooves, brushing dirt out of his fur, and petting him helping him feel better since he will eventually become fatigued if you don’t do these simple but immersive minigames. Playing with him is a touch odd since it involves just calling him to different spots and telling him to rear up, and while mucking his stables isn’t particularly fun, it does seem like expected horse care that won’t be required too often but still helps you to possibly feel like you’re taking care of your friend a bit more than purely treating him as your means of getting around.
THE VERDICT: Despite the catching missions and the scourge that is Frau Holle, Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered actually could be a mostly decent buy for a young horse lover. While a good deal of missions can feel a bit shallow, the riding and elements like the horse care are well done. The relationship between your sprinting stamina and the jump meter gives the frequent races some greater depth than just riding fast and even the free-riding has little extras to do. The repetitive and rough mission design does run the adventure into the ground before it can complete its loose and simplistic story, but for kids who might not ever get that far it might still offer the basic appeal of horse-riding well enough.
And so, I give Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered for PlayStation 5…
A BAD rating. Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered does have some good ideas for tougher challenges, one of the last in the game being trying to collect apples that refresh a very small timer as they are strewn about in a patch you have to learn their layout and follow closely to succeed. However, for each challenge like that you can probably expect bumbling about a large area of forest looking for something or around 3 chasing challenges placed all too close together. Frau Holle embodies the issues with the catching missions perfectly, there being no thought put into yet another run to try and catch the cow that shouldn’t be outpacing you in the first place, and she takes what started as a fine joke and interesting mission type and wears it down through overuse and a lack of imagination. A young player may never make it to these missions that can challenge even an adult with their rough design and tight timing requirements though, and Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered has some effective riding and the extra touches you’d hope for in a game that offers a wide open range to ride through. It might have been nicer of Mika and Windstorm’s bond had room to grow rather than the two already trusting each other absolutely, the horse care elements a good mix of short and immersive but not as strong as they would be if you were doing them to grow closer to your own special companion. Young players may prefer to make their own horse and imagine it as their journey rather than entering a tie-in adventure, but there are some of the fundamentals you’d hope for in what there is to do and how the riding is handled for an effective horse riding game before Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered starts struggling to provide you with things worth doing.
It is a shame another horse riding game ends up falling short of hitting the mark, but Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship – Remastered starts more promising than its contemporaries and is more often a bit shallow and repetitive than heinous in its issues. It does give me more hope than the other horse games I’ve played, especially since the Windstorm series continues on after this one and presumably some changes in design could have taken it away from the stumbles in mission design and overreliance on weaker concepts. This adventure at least falls closer into the range of “acceptable for children and genre fans” rather than being a true failure, but I still believe there’s a horse game out there where we won’t have to settle for what we were given in this nearly adequate remaster.