Black Skylands Review (Frosty the Suicidal Snowman)
A fun top-down shooter game that does everything pretty well for what it is. Visuals are nice with the pixel graphics, if sometimes a bit muddy (when you aren't on your ship).
Sound feels good, especially when you fire a barrage of cannon fire from your little ship.
The game is solidly made, but there is a weird roughness sometimes to the game in that I do not recommend playing this game on higher difficulties. You can switch difficulties freely, so feel free to change it up as needed, but I found the highest difficulties tedious than truly challenging. There are no difficulty related achievements, so pick whatever feels right.
I do have a few nitpicks with this game, but they are overall pretty minor.
Dropped items like money, ammo, and medkits despawn too quickly. Please have them exist for an extra 15 seconds or something.
Weapon variety: There are various weapons to use in this game, but half the weapons are rather uninspired and copies of weapons you get early on. A main mechanic of this game is not only different ammo types, but half the weapons in the game you get in the beginning half do terrible damage against "swarm" enemies. Making them useless in the later half of the game. Truthfully, I would have liked to see more unique weapons, and have all weapons do normal damage overall. Maybe a gun that shot a swarm of small bugs that followed enemies? The devs would have been better off removing the "swarm" versions of the SMG, Assault rifle, etc, entirely. Instead, they could have made really weird and inspired bug-themed weapons, instead of just reskinned previous weapons. In particular, I liked the twisted rifle and even the backwards rocket launcher and would have liked to see more unique weapons like that
Bugs and stability: I encountered only 1 annoying bug in the game, but I never crashed. Thankfully, there are no "showstoppers" to be found. I did encounter some "stutters" in gameplay, but they never really happened in combat and only during random ship exploration, so it was a minor annoyance at most. However, in the late-game without spoilers, the game introduces an extra "gamemode" inside the main game of sorts, which challenges you in various ways, called "raids". Long story short, more than once I encountered enemies who spawned and were invulnerable and prevented further progress. It urked me, but luckily, these raids don't take longer than 20 minutes normally, so it wasn't horrible timeloss.
Overall, I quite enjoyed this game. If you want a more than competent top-down shooter with some light piratey-ship combat, this game delivers.