The manuscript by Cioni et al. (10+ authors) presents a comparative study of numerical simulation methods for analyzing floating wind turbine wakes. Two established simulation approaches—Free Vortex Wake and ALM-URANS—are employed to generate wake data, which are then compared against experimental results up to 5 rotor diameters downstream of a model wind turbine with prescribed motion. The authors also utilize blade-resolved URANS and ALM-LES methods on two cases to provide additional insights. The comparison reveals varying levels of agreement and discrepancies between simulated and experimental wake characteristics. 

Overall, this reviewer finds the manuscript valuable to the floating wind energy research community, and the experimental data presented is particularly interesting. However, the manuscript contains numerous errors, including typographical mistakes, incorrect citations, erroneous section numbers, and disordered figure arrangements. The overall quality falls short of standard expectations for a submitted manuscript and appears more akin to a first draft. Nevertheless, these issues can be addressed through careful revision.

Given the number of errors identified, I hope the editor allows me to provided direct annotations on the PDF file of the preprint, with 70+ comments in total. I request that the authors carefully consider each annotation, provide point-by-point responses, and resubmit the manuscript for a second round of review.

In the manuscript, the authors conduct a systematic comparison of engineering-fidelity models for a scaled floating wind turbine subject to a variety of platform motions. Models of various fidelity are compared with higher-fidelity approaches (some LES) as well as experimental measurements. Considered platform motions principally include surge, pitch, and yaw with some misaligned conditions also considered. The comparisons are comprehensive and will be a valuable resource to the community in guiding the selection of appropriate approaches. The basic conclusion is that FVM and ALM are capable of correctly predicting loads and the steady and unsteady wake responses under surge and pitch conditions. For yaw and misalignment, ALM is superior to FVM.

Overall, the manuscript is comprehensive and few changes are required in my view for publication. A couple of minor comments:

1. Not all of the figures are referenced in the text, and some of the figure references are incorrect.

2. The results are presented in a mix of dimension and non-dimensional units. Considering the scale, presenting results in non-dimensional form will aid in generalizing to full-scale conditions.

The topic of floating WT's is an important topic, and the availability of experimental wind turbine data under simulated floating offshore platform movement is indispensable. The comparison with several numerical simulation methods gives a good impression how this experimental data can be used for code validation.

The article in its current form contains many textual errors (in text, captions, references).

The figures would benefit from using a uniform layout and color scheme.

This reviewer struggled to identify the goal of the article: was it to demonstrate the usefulness of the experimental data or was it to validate the several numerical implementations? (I guess it's the former) This uncertainty is also present in the title of the article that is formulated as a question, that can be answered with "It depends...".

The results of the simulations were from specific implementations of specific flow modelling choices, using specific runtime settings. The discussion of the results should make clearer that the conclusions are valid for these specific computer programs using specific settings and cannot be generalized to, for example, "the FVW and ALM methods ...". 

In short: This is an important article that needs revisions before publication.