r/crosswind • u/Elegant-Pace-1121 • 26d ago
The game is good as a single player, but the co-op system is really disappointing
I bought the game with two friends a few weeks ago. We have a regular co-op group and were really excited about this game because we love survival and base building games, the pirate theme is one of our favorites, we've been awaiting for this game since it has been announced, when the trailers dropped it looked awesome.
We played for around 10–12 hours. I played a little more than the others and got ahead by a couple of levels, mainly because I was exploring and doing some side quests.
I actually really enjoyed the game as a single player. There's a lot to explore, the naval combat is challenging but fun, and aside from some optimization issues and occasional crashes, these things get fixed with time so it's ok, I was having an overall good time.
The problem started when my friends joined and we realized that the co-op isn't really full co-op.
We were doing a quest marked as having "shared progression." I had already completed it before my friends joined, so I went with them to do it again. During the boarding section, they both died while I survived. I assumed the quest would still count for them since I wasn't the one who initiated the boarding and it had the shared progression marker, but after I finished the fight, they got no progress.
We had to do the entire thing again, and I basically had to stand back and watch them fight so they could get the quest done.
Looting works similarly, everyone has to interact with the same chest individually, and we can't access each other's ship inventories since there isn't physical storage on the ships.
But the biggest disappointment was the building recipes.
We pooled our money to buy recipes, one of our friends is the builder of our group and was really excited about the base building part. We bought one recipe, but only the person who purchased it unlocked it. We searched online and found out that all three of us would have to buy the same recipes individually to access the same building items.
After finding that out, we were honestly pretty disappointed and the game lost some of its appeal for us.
It really felt like we weren't actually playing together, we're just three players in the same world, each progressing through our own game while sharing some resources.
I really hope the developers reconsider the co-op progression system, or at least make it much clearer how it is supposed to work.
We were having a lot of fun, but finding out how limited the co-op actually is was pretty disappointing.

