Forever Skies Review (Acierocolotl)
Did you ever think to yourself, "Gosh, Raft was fun, but I'd like it in a post-apocalyptic Earth with huge scifi overtones, drifting over ruined buildings"? Then have I got a game for you!
There's a simple formula to a genre I'm going to call Raft-likes: It's a build-your-base craft-and-survival game, except your base is mobile, and the sorts of materials you need to build up your base can be found floating around nearby. This is no exception, except instead of grappling hooks, you've got scifi pintle-mounted salvage lasers.
I'm gonna be honest with you, it's kind of a formula I like. And while I'm being honest, my first go at reviewing this game was a long and tedious-for-me ramble. So let's start with it being scifi Raft with dirigibles, okay?
The world is really moody AF. There's all these derelict towers, many of which are little more than steel skeletons, some of them with bits of concrete left. They're twisted and gnarled. You can't see the bottom of the towers, or the ground itself, because there's this roiling, soupy green (sometimes red or blue) opaque mass of... something? It swirls around, it will do bad things to your ship. There's a part of me that doesn't believe these structures should still be standing, but then that's overthinking things anyway.
If you're prone to vertigo, you're going to hate this game so much. Some structures are little more than a handful of beams with crumbling, tattered walkways. Sometimes you'll have to jump, and your character is ill and frequently gets tired. You whiff that jump and it's a 300 meter plummet into soupy green doom. On normal difficulty, you lose some of your inventory.
Apart from whiffing a jump, there's stationary monsters in the later stages of the game, aggro plants (also stationary), and little shards of glass. None of these will get you if you're paying attention. Oh, yeah, also you gotta eat and drink, the common annoyance of this genre. It's not too bad, but if your hunger meter goes empty, YOU DIE. So, you know, have a snack. But you don't even have to worry about Some Kind of Shark nibbling your dirigible-fortress.
You do have to worry about memory leaks, though. Sometimes the game gets chundery. It struggled to run on a computer that played Cyberpunk 2077 on (admittedly low-ish) settings.
Now, serious downside: This game's possibly a bit memory-leaky and has some issues with loading smoothly. Granted, I am using a mechanical hard drive, the SSD is for special occasions. But sometimes things drop to single-digit framerates. It may recover, and it IS early access after all, but a little love in that department wouldn't hurt.
Personal Gripe #1: Pretty much all the areas in the game, so far, were pretty compact, and the few that weren't were pretty linear. The final game area, the Suburbs, is not. This wasn't an issue except it's one of those areas under poison fog, which effectively means you're on a timer. Move quickly. They give you these weirdo fruits you can eat for extra air, and after a bit you can cultivate them yourself, but I really just wanted to explore the area without the time pressure. There's a whole lot of new things going on that I wanted to see.
Personal Gripe #2: Storage containers don't hold a great deal, and I wound up needing nearly a dozen to keep my stuff in order. There were larger containers that require a great deal of luck to find, and those are bulky affairs that only go on walls. I wouldn't have minded larger containers; even though the constructors draw from them, the research facilities don't. Organization would remove a bit of minor annoyance.
These aren't the hugest gripes and I'm sure a bit of tuning or extra content would solve both. Early access, etc., etc.
So the game looks good, has a great mood, does a take on the Raft formula I like, and they're adding coop to it soon-ish. It's not there yet, so if coop is required, you want to wait. I'll likely tack a response or edit onto this when it happens. I had a good time, I'll go back to it after a content drop or two. I streamed part of it before and will likely again: http://twitch.tv/fdejeuner it's back here because I'm kind of picky. People who read are my kind of people.