Windmill Engine

Genre: Idle Game / Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Windmill Engine, released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2022 is a… rather perplexing game. If I had to pin this game to a genre, I suppose I would call it an Idle Game, except this is like no Idle Game I’ve ever played. For one thing, I completed the game (100%) in 7 minutes.

Players are tasked with building up a windmill piece by piece, with each piece purchased adding a new element onto the windmill tower, and increasing the earnings the tower makes. Players will be upgrading the fan blades, the stones adorning the tower, the windows… it’s not exactly clear how most of these upgrades make this tower more profitable, but by the end you’ll be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per second, so realism clearly has little to do with this game.

As an idle game, you’ll be earning money over time, with increased earnings coming from each part you upgrade, though you do have the option to tap the Y button to earn a little extra. This will soon prove unnecessary – the amount of money you make from the purchased parts will quickly and exponentially grow to the point where the money earned by tapping the button will be laughable by comparison. In fact, you earn new upgrades and in turn make profit at such an increased rate that buying all available upgrades within a few minutes of starting the game seems inevitable.

I suppose you could look at this like an Idle Game played on fast-forward, but unfortunately there isn’t much nuance or variety to what you’re doing. Occasionally you’ll have a part “break” requiring a quick repair, but otherwise the only strategy here is “buy, buy buy”.

The presentation doesn’t make up for the gameplay either. The game uses simple, ugly 3D visuals to depict its windmill (which doesn’t even start with any windmill blades), everything looks clunky and fake, with this backed by a relaxing piano melody that completely crashes with the absurd speed the windmill is spinning.

For a mere $1 price tag, I don’t know what I expected from Windmill Engine, but I certainly didn’t expect to see everything the game has to offer in less time than it takes to play The Beatles’ song Hey Jude. It’s not even that the game is short, it’s that the mere few minutes spent playing the game is boring, repetitive, and ugly. Skip this one.

tl;dr – Windmill Engine is what you would get if you played an Idle Game on fast-forward so it only takes a few minutes to 100% complete the game. Those few minutes will be boring and repetitive, and all the while you’ll be looking at an ugly windmill. Even at $1, I cannot see this being a game anyone will find worth buying.

Grade: D

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