Windforge

Windforge is a pretty interesting game in 2D exploration/building genre, which could be great if it didn’t suffer from bugs, certain annoying mechanics, and general feeling of unfinishingness.
The main unique feature of Windforge is that you travel around the world in entirely customizable airship. Everything you add to your airship in Windforge affects its performance: propellers determine its speed, balloons help the airship stay afloat and rise, turrets are used in combat, engines are required to power other devices, and even blocks and cosmetic furniture matter in that they weight your ship down.
Unlike games like Terraria or Starbound, Windforge's focus is almost entirely on exploration and fighting rather than building: in fact, you will likely only build your airship, as there’s no point of building a house. Windforge also has almost no decorative items, and most of decorations it does have are not actually available for player to make or collect and place on their airship or house.
When it comes to combat, the challenge is average at best. While enemies can be dangerous during early to early-mid game, the AI is terrible, which is particularly noticeable in ship combat: it is too easy to outmaneuver and destroy even much stronger AI ship. But certain enemies, like krakens or large dragons can still present a danger to you or your ship through mid-game. Bosses are also a disappointment: they generally have similar attacks and attack patterns, and like most enemies suffer from terrible AI.
Aside from poor AI, another glaring negative is that the world design is rather bland. Random locations are very similar: they are all just collections of floating islands, occasionally with ruins on them. The only reason to visit them is to mine ore or collect recipes from the ruins: you won’t be visiting a new location wondering what you might find there. And it doesn’t help that you spend much of the game travelling through these similar locations, typically having to travel through over 10 locations to get from one quest location to another.
Also, unfortunately, there are a lot of bugs and glitches. Officially Windforge isn’t in Early Access, but it certainly feels like it is – with exception that the work on it has stopped. Most notable is that blocks can glitch through each other during collision, like when airship falls atop another, or to the ground, making it hard to dismantle fallen airship. Physical model is also glitches sometimes, making an airship or whale’s body suddenly fly up or sideward, or bounce on spot. And game’s save/load system also has a number of bugs and exploits, like player’s ability to replenish breathing air by saving and then loading game, or how freshly killed enemies revive after loading (with minimal HP, that allows easy double kill), though these can mostly be avoided by the player.
But overall, I’d say that Windforge is quite an interesting game, despite its bugs and other shortcomings. If you are looking for more combat/adventure-orientated take on Terraria/Starbound, you may give Windforge a try.

Most of the negativity surrounding this game is based on its unrealised potential. And to be fair, Windforge is not a game that could be considered "complete" - there's numerous areas it could have done with more work, from story to the conspicuous lack of multiplayer.
(Ok, there's a pretty prolific bug that might kill the game before it starts up as well, but for the sake of argument we'll ignore that.)
But despite this, despite what it never quite had, Windforge is a phenomenal game, and it's a true testiment to its solid design that it still achieves what many other full games fail to.
Ostensibly, Windforge fits into the same genre as games like Terraria and Minecraft, but whereas those sand-box world-builders are divided into sections of "building bases" or "fighting badguys" (and very little inbetween) - your building efforts directly correlate to combat-success, because you're building flying bases.
This, coupled with a solid crafting system that never sees older materials being upper-classes by newer ones (Early-game Iron is often a component for more resilient later-game alloys as an example), the enjoyable combat and movement, with the added aesthetics of stunning visuals and an amazing soundtrack makes Windforge the sort of game you can easily sink tens or hundreds of hours into.
And it has to be said, Cordeus (the world of Windforge) is one of the best realised game worlds ever. Mechanically it gently encourage the player to up their game and rebuild their ship/gear through the environment alone. Falling meteors in the upper atmo? You might want to protect your hydrogen balloons then! Poisonous gas on the lower level? Pack an air purifier and/or breath aparatus.
It's amazing how the game can flip from platformer to near-lovecrafting survival from one zone to the next, though of course, a skilled player can often play around these, but it's nice to know there's the option to craft a solution as well.
I don't disagree that this game could have been more, but even with what you've got, it's a worthwhile experience.
So if, like me, you're looking for something different, give windforge a go, but if you want something that's highly polished and can be played with mates, maybe give it a miss.

You get to build your own airship piece by piece and then fly it around. If that sounds good to you then you should get this game.
Other good things:
-The materials you make your ship out of determine its durability and maneuverability.
-There is a story and an endgame, but you can keep playing after you've finished it.
-The materials you make your equipment out of affect the stats of the items.
-The grappling hook is fun.
-The late-game gas makes for some tense exploration moments when you have to get out of your ship.
-Increasing your stats gives you very useful perks.
-You have one chest of infinite holding and can place access points to it anywhere which makes item storage very simple. Some may view this as a negative.
-Ramming other ships is super fun.
Bad things:
-The controls take some getting used to. Everything has some weird kind of intertia to it, plus every ship I made had a tendency to drift.
-The view makes building a pain. Foreground blocks can obscure the view of background blocks that they are not actually covering which makes it difficult to tell if your ship is airtight.
-There is only one method of fast travel and it is not very useful. You will spend a lot of time just flying from one location to another.
-Building a stationary base is pointless. The lack of fast travel means you would spend even more time just travelling to and from the base. The power system in the game doesn't really update properly in a stationary base so it is hard to get power to devices without using a lot of generators. It's even harder to get a stationary base airtight partly due to the view but also because you can't tell if the generated background blocks are blocking gas or not. The item chest makes it so you don't need an area to store items. I understand the point of the game is to build flying bases but some people would probably like to have a stationary one as well.
-Monster spawning can drive you nuts. When a kraken spawns right beside you while you're looting a ship and you don't notice it until it has rammed a hole right through your ship and then you kill the kraken and just finish repairing your ship when another spawns right beside you and does the same thing.
I played through the game twice to get all of the achievements and enjoyed both playthroughs.

You will not regret buying this game!
Very interesting world. Great gameplay. The mining is a pit finicky but other than that it plays very well.
The airship mechanices are amazing! I wish starbound had the same depth for the ships as this does for the airships.
If you want a game that lets you build, maintain, and upgrade your own fleet of airships in a sidescroller steampunk world then this is the game for you!
This game does not hold your hand, you have to use your brain. I have found many modern gamers take issue with this fact. I say to those people that they need to play blaster master and many other classic games. Modern games hold your hand too much so this is very refreshing.
Graphics rock, flying whales which you can harvest rock. The ship to ship combat is awesome.
Just don't fall out of your airship, it is a long drop!!

This game got a bum rap when it first came out. There were bugs, and game review sites were not kind. But the devs kept at it, and did a good amount of patching in the months following the game's release. By the time I got it, everything seemed to be in order and I had a blast with it. The guts of the game are that you're an airship captain trying to figure out why the sky whales (yes!) are disappearing. It falls solidly into the Terraria 2D crafting genre, but rather than building a base, digging like crazy, and exploring the depths, you're going to spend a lot of time flying around, desigining ships, and getting into lots of air combat, which is both fun and hilarious.
That's not to say the game is perfect. The animations are a little weird, and clicking on things is sometimes inaccurate because of the faux three-dimensional appearance of the game. And combat can get frustrating sometimes. But the world is interesting and has a neat backstory. And the setting is so cool, with different layers of the cloud world having different styles and effects, and the flying whales are just awesome. The whale fat adds bouyancy, and can be added to your airships, allowing for truly bizarre ship designs if you're so inclined.
For the price, there's plenty of fun to be had here, and it's markedly better than a number of other entries that came in the wake of Terraria's success. And it has a real story that can be completed, giving some structure to what's normally a formless sandbox genre. So if you're looking for a Terraria-like game with a unique twist, try this one out.

I just completed this game and felt like I should chime in on what I liked and disliked.
At first I felt like this was going to be like Terraria, it is and it isn't. It's very much its own game, themed around progression through crafting.
The setting is unique, in that it's flying ships and floating islands. The ships vary from houses to battleships. There's different factions in the game but there's no way to increase or decrease your standing with any, which would have been a nice feature but it's also not necessary. The cities are very unique but in their uniqueness I'd also complain that they're really hard to navigate at first as they have an almost randomly generated feel.. I have no idea if this is the case as I know the bulk of the game is procedurally generated but it wouldn't shock me to find out this is the case.
The world itself is massive, by the time I had completed the game I had been through roughly half of it.. I say 'been through' but for the most part I didn't explore half of the areas I went into and just sailed through them quickly on my way to places. I bought every crafting recipe I came across and still had about a hundred that I hadn't discovered also.
The downsides to the game in my opinion, were that I started skipping vast areas of the game because it felt like it was just going to be more of the same.. I'm sure I missed things, there's likely entire types of generated structures that I didn't stumble upon but after I had explored a few areas of each type it felt like the rest of the areas were going to be like that and there were a huge amount of them.
The game also makes itself too easy on you. There should absolutely be difficulty settings, it feels like the game itself is stuck on easy for this type of game as it has no death penalty in the slightest. You lose no gear when you die, you don't have to retrieve corpses or craft new gear.. essentially after you've upgraded your gear to the next tier there's literally no point in going out and mining that type of metal again, especially in the late game when you're mining the zones seem to throw abundant amounts of low level metals at you that barely serve a purpose.
The game also instantly hands you a 'radio' which is a no expense, unlimited use, get out of jail free card. It's ridiculous. It says it wont work 'if it's too dangerous' but in my experience dangerous in the radio's opinion is indoors or while actually falling. Some of the funnest experiences I had in the game involved not using the radio and grappling onto passing ships or whales to carry me to other places or to hijack the ship completely as my own. I can understand there being situations in the game where you're stranded and you need a way out, but I'd like to bring up the point again that there is no death penalty in the game. Dying serves exactly the same purpose as the radio and it's always possible to die. There needs to be a penalty for both or at least difficulty settings that add such a thing.
Another issue I had with the game was that you spend a large amount of the game learning to craft 4 exotic materials. They appear to be the highest grade materials in the game, but through playing the game I never had access to the materials as I never gained the materials to create the furnace required to make them. I checked the forums and this issue was listed as fixed but it absolutely wasn't.
It feels a little silly to complain about this, as the materials I did have access to made me incredibly overpowered by the end of the game anyways. The final boss battles were amoungst the easiest I've ever had in a game as the damage was just practically non existant. I'd like to pat myself on the back for some clever strategies on some of them but at the same time I almost feel like it was possibly poor design and incredibly poor AI that made it possible.
These points aside, I found the game genuinely fun and I would recommend it. It has it's flaws and it took a while to grow on me but after it did I was sucked in for a few solid days until completion.

Pros:
+ Extremely vertical and varried world. If you fall, you could end up falling for miles
+ Decent exploration. You never know what you will run into.
+ Airship battles
+ Abandoning your airship to sabotage another from the inside.
+ Fire system. It can spread, and take out your entire ship if you're not careful.
+ Sky whales. Enough said?
+ The most terrifying underworld I've ever seen. Honestly, I don't think I can ever go down there.
+ Grapple hooks. Better swinging mechanics than most spider man games.
+ Using animals as parachutes. Not that I would do something so cruel...
+ Allowing you to attempt to fix your airship while in free fall, instead of just saying game over.
+ Allowing you to get stuck in areas if your ship gets shot down and you don't have another
+ Hijacking other ships.
+- Ship Ammo at first is hard to come by, but it did lead to the most epic demolition derbys ever so I'm not sure thats a con
Cons:
- optimisation is a bit meh. It dropped into the single digits on my nvidia770 during a few of the scripted sequences. Specifically the ones where a lot was happening, buildings turning to sand and such.
- Loot system can be a bit mean when I spend forever shooting a crazy armored guy with my weak gun and he drops a walnut to congradulate me.
- Camera doesn't zoom out as far as I'd like when flying airships. I've hit more buildings than I can count because of this.
Overall: Way better than they get credit for. Not many games let you fail as hard as this one, and even fewer let you manually climb all the way back up every time you do.