Black Skylands

Shallow Gameplay, Shallow Story This game had potential, an interesting setting and unique mechanics but severely under-delivers. Gunplay: Gives the illusion of depth with the variety of weapon types and attachments but ends up just feeling like there is 2 types of guns, semi and auto with not much difference otherwise. Enemies also get stronger as the game goes on and require specific types of ammo to deal bonus damage but there is also no need due to everything is a bullet sponge anyways so there's no reason to swap for the bonus. Puzzles: Super simple puzzles which have clues that are just left around with a bit "!" on it, or essentially a fetch quest. Progression: After 10 mins, you essentially have unlocked everything and the upgrades just change how much damage you can deal, nothing new will happen, no new play-styles or techniques. The base also just "exists", you can upgrade the shops but that's about it, nothing to do on it other than to teleport to heal up, and to waste time opening boxes that could just instantly open. Story: Was interesting at the start but they quickly forget all that and you start doing odd-jobs around the neighborhood. Misc: - Every time you clear an island - 10s of unskippable default particles masquerading as fireworks - Clunky UI controls (mouse only sometimes works) - Re/Fuel does not cost anything but time

I bought this game on steam right when they first released it in ea. The developers are very active and obviously love this game. The feel and look of the world is pretty great. controls are solid. Flying around is a lot of fun. My only wish is for coop. Flying the ships around with a friend to help crew the ship would be so much fun. I beat the game in about 10hrs at release. since then they have added in a bunch more content including (essentially) raid bosses. For me the appeal of the game was less rushing through the story and more the exploration. There is a lot of secrets to find.

decent action gameplay, but also a bit repetitive nice and simple upgrading system, but sometimes a bit tedious (mod chests) open world alike, but no real exploring (everythig is marked on the map) story is ok (could have been so much more), but (imo) awful writing and character design

Really fun game with some great exploring and upgrading. And the story was actually pretty engaging as well. There were just a couple odd issues that kept this from being a 5-star rating from me. I saw the kraken a few times early in my game but avoided it because I was weak. Once I finally felt ready to fight it, I never saw it ever again despite cruising around huge chunks of the map. At one point I ventured into an area that was supposed to be locked behind additional story progression. But instead of telling me and/or blocking my path somehow, the game just reverted my save back to before I completed the island. I thought it had glitched, so I did the area again, only to get my progress removed again. The ships are bugged out. I mainly used the Elephant, which is supposed to be the slowest ship. But when I'd switch to any of the others, they would be even slower and unable to boost.

..., but fun till the end nonetheless. I played on the hardest difficulty, which is extremely easy compared to other "twinstick-shooters" in lieu of a better term, and had taken my time with this game, did all the achievements and even got all the raid weapons and all in all, I had lots of fun with it. The game delivers many things I would like more games to do, especially the ship combat, but at the same time it's all pretty much always not as fleshed out and in depth as I imagined it to be. For instance by making something just completely redundant like in the case of being able to teleport the fathership, which isn't really helping at all, because you can fast travel to it and any other gas station whenever you want and there are lots of them as well as a pretty small open world in the first case. Wish they'd kept the farming from early access, but, as I said, a lot of fun till the end nonetheless.