izigame.me

My family and I call this game Sky Raft, because that's how it plays. On a good day it's fantastic, chill and relaxing, building out my airship, feeding my people, gardening. On a bad day it's jittery, nonperformant (on my 4080), and janky. Personally I love it in spite of its flaws, but not everyone will. Detailed review follows.
* Construction review:
The good: it's fun in that Raft way. There's a decent but not overwhelming amount you can do; plenty of room to grow and there seem to be plans to expand what you can do even further. There's a snap-to-grid system with variable divisions (like in your settings you can set 1/8 or 1/16th of a square for snapping). And you can rotate freely or to cardinal directions. Lots of flexibility.
The bad: the snap-to-grid system is equal parts helpful, fascinating, and frustrating, because the grid is artificial; it's not really anchored to anything, just overlaid on top of free movement. And the grid alignment actually moves as you fly, which means something placed 1/16 of a square away from the edge won't actually line up with something placed 1/16 of a square away from the edge with the ship in another orientation. This means if you need to add another planter to your row down the road, you're probably going to turn off snapping and manually line it up, which isn't awful but can be bewildering. And laying pipes takes some getting used to; it's not immediately obvious that pipes have a plane, and sometimes making things line up when you need to switch directions is a chore.
You'll need to expand your airship at some point to carry around more weight, which should have a fun sense of progression to it. But in reality, this is tedious because there's no way to skirt the requirements (like "you must have a balloon that holds this much weight," "you must have this many turbines") while you are building, even if you've landed. This leads to silly build workarounds, like adding a long hallway to your ship to attach another balloon to it, just so that you can have enough weight capacity to remove your existing balloon to replace it with the new fancy one you just unlocked, and then deconstruct the workaround. Suggestion to devs: let us use the Workshop landing pad to enter a build mode or something.
* Resource gathering review (i.e. the chop chop, dig dig, zen zoning out):
The good: the idea of having a handheld thing that disintegrates an object into its core resources into your inventory is fantastic sci-fi. You don't need separate axes and pickaxes to gather different stuff; it's all done (with the exception of cutting down plants) with one piece of equipment that stays with you forever. You can recharge it manually or with batteries you find around the world. And later, you can automate most of this by building automatic versions for your ship that fill up with materials as you fly.
The bad: nothing since I discovered you can make fiberglass from your suit printer!
* Exploration review:
The good: there are three discrete biomes with different types of islands to explore. You'll find places on some earlier islands that you can't get to yet, so there's some replayability when you have to revisit those with new tech. You'll find your ability to explore is gated in a few ways: how high your airship can fly, whether you can break or manipulate certain obstacles (either with your Extractor tool or with your crossbow), and recipe/schematic unlocks. Typical survival game stuff.
The Underdust is a really fascinating take on what would be underwater exploration in Raft: a hostile environment where you need an oxygen tank to breathe. However, the breath mechanic is sort of trivialized by the prevalence of consumables to restore oxygen -- which is in turn necessary because of the scope of the underdust areas. And there are enemies down there.
The bad: the only way you have to navigate is with your radar, which doesn't have a zoom or a legend and so lacks any indication of what icons mean; this in turn makes it harder to tell which islands spawn in which biomes, so if you're looking for a particular one it can be kind of a crapshoot. I'd also really appreciate a minimap in the Underdust; it's super easy to get turned around when everything is covered in green fog.
* Progression review:
The good: for important things, you mostly scan them to unlock them. You then research them, and then you can build them yourself. This makes it pretty exciting to find a red-painted wrecked object in the world. And there are hints early on that foreshadow improvements you'll be able to make, for things to look forward to. (Like the existence of a "small freezer" implies the later existence of a large one, and boy, was that handy.) And for recipes (versus technology), owning the prerequisite of a thing allows you to unlock the recipe for that thing.
The bad: some rudimentary ship parts are locked behind randomized "data card" blueprints -- like *doors* of all things. This is fine for most parts, but doors should be a starter unlock. It's also possible to soft-lock yourself if you go out-of-order with respect to the story missions. For instance, at the beginning of the game, I found myself building a second scanner because the first ran out of battery and I couldn't yet build a charger--but that battery I used to build the second copy? I needed it for my research station, so I could research walls. To attach my Turbines to. So I could go higher, to progress to the next place that I could get a battery from. I was stuck until I went into game settings and enabled the legacy building rules that allow you to attach turbines to the ship frame directly.
I've also somehow entered a state where ship parts I've already researched have reappeared in my "to be researched" menu, which would double-consume some parts. So that's a bug.
* Performance review:
This is just "the bad".
I have a very recent system with a 4080. I run most things in 4k on high settings and typically get passable FPS. But not in Forever Skies. This game isn't doing enough to justify its performance struggles, but it does *so* struggle, at times. Especially in the Underdust. This game really needs a performance pass.
There are also some issues with ship versus person locomotion, which are evident when you play co-op. Now, mostly I commend the developers for getting things about 90% correct (like if I stand on a docking plank while the ship is moving, I move with it). But that 10% is frustrating: if I climb a ladder while the ship's altitude is changing, I sometimes don't end up on the floor where I intended to go. Or I clip through stuff in a weird way.
* Combat review:
This is also just "the bad". It's clunky. The hitboxes are bad. Enemies can see me through walls, and shoot projectiles at me that I can't figure out the source of. Getting exhausted after swinging my knife three times feels bad. Sometimes I go from full health to dead without understanding why. And did nobody in this world invent guns? I get that you're supposed to feel underpowered against a hostile world, and the game succeeds at that for the first adventure or two under the dust, but once the Chekov's Gun has fired, it's just frustrating. (Looking at you, Underdust Suburbs!)
Overall verdict: I do love this game. There are a few things to be done that would make me love it even more. Most of the time it feels like Sky Raft, and that's a good thing.
* Requests to the devs:
* performance pass
* better map/radar, with a legend of icons
* give me doors
* add a build mode so I can replace my balloons and turbines
* underdust minimap with icons for o2 stations
* combat rework