What a game! What a lovely game! Yes, this game is so good I have to resurrect old Fury Road quotes. Just the other week, I was commenting on how I liked The Ascent more than it deserves just because dualstick shooter RPG is pretty much my dream genre, but there are very few to choose from. I had Black Skylands on my wishlist, but really, I only bought it because of the unusual top-down camera angle and the steampunk airships, not really realizing that it was going to be an open world dualstick shooter RPG.
It is and I love it! You ride your airship around, take on main quests or visiting side quest islands only to explore or help people out with something or other. You can go fishing for rare fish to trade for weapon mods, for your arsenal of guns with a wide build variety thanks to an enormous amount of mods. I absolutely loved riding my airship full speed into a dock full of enemies, jumping off without slowing down and blasting those fools as my ship drifted off on its own and I did it almost every time I landed on an island. Hell, I loved doing almost everything in this game.
So, let's face the obvious thing. This game is not pretty. It will not attract you with its visuals, and the visuals made me assume that this was going to be a janky like student project level game with neat ideas but awful execution, but the reality is that this is a kind of ugly game that's highly polished. All throughout the learning phase of the game, I was constantly gleefully surprised to find that the game offered this or that feature that made the game more fun and/or convenient. You can fast travel not only between islands and the main "fathership", but directly to your own ship from anywhere on an island, which is just enormously convenient and time-saving when it comes to the boring trek back to your ship after you've cleared an island. The tablet that houses all of your information is clean and easily usable. You can track quests, put down your own markers, tweak your guns and your ship and read lore. All of this is standard stuff in today's market, I know, but those features also tend to show up in major games made by like 300 people with a decade of experience and it's rare to see this large amount of QoL in a little indie team's first game.
The flow of the game is such that you can fly around freely and either follow the main quest or head to the side islands, and I found it naturally easy, in a way I can't quite put into words in this review, to see what would be a main quest island and a side quest island, so it never happened that I had mistakenly cleared a main quest island before I was going there and only once had I cleared a side quest island before the side quest sent me there. You explore the island and solve a few side quest puzzles that I found enjoyable even though I mostly hate puzzles in my action games, hunt for resources used to upgrade your crafting stations at home base and, of course, do lots of dualstick shooting with a large variety of different guns that you customize to your liking with mods, and I liked doing all of it. The level design for the islands is consistently well-crafted, and I especially liked the sections that required you to do some little dodge roll and grappling hook acrobatics to reach tricky areas for a mod chest (which are addictive to collect because you always want that +++Damage in order to destroy pirate fools who dare stand in your way even harder).
I'm just rambling and I feel like I won't manage a coherent and detailed listing of everything I liked about this game, so I'll just summarize and say that I loved almost everything about this game, and playing through it from start to finish was a real joy that never left me bored. I just loved going from island to island, shooting, puzzling, airshipping and looting, I loved that enemies were finite and that defeating all of them liberated the island and reinstated peaceful inhabitants, and I kind of wanted this game to be like five times bigger and longer. Apparently, the early access version was quite different and was going to be more of a survival game with farming, more of a give and take between liberated islands being taken back by pirates and stuff, and the end result is very scaled down in that it's a semi-linear RPG with a clear start and finish and some side questing along the way, and farming has been completely stripped from the final game, but as I never played the EA version, I can't find myself too bothered by it. The idealized version from the early betas does sound like it could've been cooler, but it's understandable that they didn't earn enough during EA to be able to realize that far more ambitious vision and I very much enjoyed what's on offer here.
The worst part of the game is the plot and the writing. I was super disappointed early on when it became clear that the threat isn't actually the sky pirates, but an alien parasite species that wants to devour the world. Theyr'e called "the swarm". Yawn. We've seen that a thousand million times, from The Borg in Star Trek to The Flood in Halo and so on, and so on. Sky pirates would've actually been much more unique and fun and I don't think this game actually needed a spectacular multiverse ending involving alien gods and such. Just a big bad sky pirate to defeat would've been perfect. The actual craftsmanship of the writing is also quite questionable, and it's too often obvious that the writers aren't native english speakers. For example, one of the final mission descriptions is "Go to the Kain's fort", which is obviously some janky english and that kind of broken grammar permeates the whole script. They really ought to have asked an EA backer to proofread the script for them, since the overall good but not quite perfect grammar shows up and ruins the immersion and appreciation of the story nearly constantly. On top of that, there are certain things that translate extra poorly, like how I believe that they tried to write the main character as kind of a stern follower of the rules, but their attempt at writing stoicism just turned out to make her kind of a rude asshole. At several points, I marveled at how, wow, my character is a total dick for no reason, and I don't think that's on purpose since other characters in the game adore her and no one comments on what a cunt she is.
I'm giving this game a very high score because that's how much fun I had with it, which is to say a lot of fun. Is the game perfect and free froim bugs and jank? Absolutely not, but there was nothing big enough to ruin the enjoyment for me, and I loved every hour of this game. As soon as the (admittedly kind of wonky) tutorial was over, I fell in love and never fell out. Maybe the game's somewhat short length, for the genre, at only about 15 hours worked to its favor and maybe I would've been annoyed if the game dragged for 50 hours, but that's just another strength if so. They don't seem to be doing much on social media right now, but I hope the team is quiet because they're hard at work on a bigger and even better sequel, because I can't wait to play more!
It is and I love it! You ride your airship around, take on main quests or visiting side quest islands only to explore or help people out with something or other. You can go fishing for rare fish to trade for weapon mods, for your arsenal of guns with a wide build variety thanks to an enormous amount of mods. I absolutely loved riding my airship full speed into a dock full of enemies, jumping off without slowing down and blasting those fools as my ship drifted off on its own and I did it almost every time I landed on an island. Hell, I loved doing almost everything in this game.
So, let's face the obvious thing. This game is not pretty. It will not attract you with its visuals, and the visuals made me assume that this was going to be a janky like student project level game with neat ideas but awful execution, but the reality is that this is a kind of ugly game that's highly polished. All throughout the learning phase of the game, I was constantly gleefully surprised to find that the game offered this or that feature that made the game more fun and/or convenient. You can fast travel not only between islands and the main "fathership", but directly to your own ship from anywhere on an island, which is just enormously convenient and time-saving when it comes to the boring trek back to your ship after you've cleared an island. The tablet that houses all of your information is clean and easily usable. You can track quests, put down your own markers, tweak your guns and your ship and read lore. All of this is standard stuff in today's market, I know, but those features also tend to show up in major games made by like 300 people with a decade of experience and it's rare to see this large amount of QoL in a little indie team's first game.
The flow of the game is such that you can fly around freely and either follow the main quest or head to the side islands, and I found it naturally easy, in a way I can't quite put into words in this review, to see what would be a main quest island and a side quest island, so it never happened that I had mistakenly cleared a main quest island before I was going there and only once had I cleared a side quest island before the side quest sent me there. You explore the island and solve a few side quest puzzles that I found enjoyable even though I mostly hate puzzles in my action games, hunt for resources used to upgrade your crafting stations at home base and, of course, do lots of dualstick shooting with a large variety of different guns that you customize to your liking with mods, and I liked doing all of it. The level design for the islands is consistently well-crafted, and I especially liked the sections that required you to do some little dodge roll and grappling hook acrobatics to reach tricky areas for a mod chest (which are addictive to collect because you always want that +++Damage in order to destroy pirate fools who dare stand in your way even harder).
I'm just rambling and I feel like I won't manage a coherent and detailed listing of everything I liked about this game, so I'll just summarize and say that I loved almost everything about this game, and playing through it from start to finish was a real joy that never left me bored. I just loved going from island to island, shooting, puzzling, airshipping and looting, I loved that enemies were finite and that defeating all of them liberated the island and reinstated peaceful inhabitants, and I kind of wanted this game to be like five times bigger and longer. Apparently, the early access version was quite different and was going to be more of a survival game with farming, more of a give and take between liberated islands being taken back by pirates and stuff, and the end result is very scaled down in that it's a semi-linear RPG with a clear start and finish and some side questing along the way, and farming has been completely stripped from the final game, but as I never played the EA version, I can't find myself too bothered by it. The idealized version from the early betas does sound like it could've been cooler, but it's understandable that they didn't earn enough during EA to be able to realize that far more ambitious vision and I very much enjoyed what's on offer here.
The worst part of the game is the plot and the writing. I was super disappointed early on when it became clear that the threat isn't actually the sky pirates, but an alien parasite species that wants to devour the world. Theyr'e called "the swarm". Yawn. We've seen that a thousand million times, from The Borg in Star Trek to The Flood in Halo and so on, and so on. Sky pirates would've actually been much more unique and fun and I don't think this game actually needed a spectacular multiverse ending involving alien gods and such. Just a big bad sky pirate to defeat would've been perfect. The actual craftsmanship of the writing is also quite questionable, and it's too often obvious that the writers aren't native english speakers. For example, one of the final mission descriptions is "Go to the Kain's fort", which is obviously some janky english and that kind of broken grammar permeates the whole script. They really ought to have asked an EA backer to proofread the script for them, since the overall good but not quite perfect grammar shows up and ruins the immersion and appreciation of the story nearly constantly. On top of that, there are certain things that translate extra poorly, like how I believe that they tried to write the main character as kind of a stern follower of the rules, but their attempt at writing stoicism just turned out to make her kind of a rude asshole. At several points, I marveled at how, wow, my character is a total dick for no reason, and I don't think that's on purpose since other characters in the game adore her and no one comments on what a cunt she is.
I'm giving this game a very high score because that's how much fun I had with it, which is to say a lot of fun. Is the game perfect and free froim bugs and jank? Absolutely not, but there was nothing big enough to ruin the enjoyment for me, and I loved every hour of this game. As soon as the (admittedly kind of wonky) tutorial was over, I fell in love and never fell out. Maybe the game's somewhat short length, for the genre, at only about 15 hours worked to its favor and maybe I would've been annoyed if the game dragged for 50 hours, but that's just another strength if so. They don't seem to be doing much on social media right now, but I hope the team is quiet because they're hard at work on a bigger and even better sequel, because I can't wait to play more!