Beyond a Steel Sky

It's 2023 and the game still has glitches, as in: * certain scenes play twice simultaneously with a delay of about 5-10 seconds, all characters doubled * in at least one place, objects refuse to disappear from their place when picked up * it's really hard to interract with certain characters because the reticule would not appear unless you are standing in an overly specific spot Fortunately, those are just annoyances and none is a game-breaker. I love the Borderlands-like graphic style. The story is deep and touching and poses some important philosophical questions. The 3D is clumsy at times but really well done. All in all, it's a solid game. I'm only deducting a third of a star for the glitches and two thirds for keeping the Mac version exclusive to Apple Arcade.

I've thoroughly enjoyed this sequel. The graphics are beautiful and the plot is thought-provoking, but not overbearing. The puzzles are more on the easy side and can almost always be solved with a bit of thinking and some trial and error. Hence I'd recommend it especially to people who are new to the genre. A hint-system is also included. The "hacking" mechanic is working great and it's a lot of fun to play around with it and see how much mischief you can cause. They're relying a lot on it in this game, but fortunately not quite too much (although sometimes it feels like they're getting close to using it too much). Tonally, this game is MUCH more coherent than the original. I felt the game was a bit heavy-handed in its references to the first game, but that's okay, I guess. I can say that I have not run into any problems or glitches at all.

As a fan or Revolution software I gotta say I was very skeptical about another 3D point and click game since BS3 & 4 didn't sit well with me, but I liked Beneath a Steel Sky so I decided to give it a chance, and let me tell you, this game doesn't deserve the middle of the way rating it has, this game is awesome. + The graphics are beautiful, bright and colorful, the slightly cel shaded comic look make it timeless + Music is on par, very fitting for the setting + Thew voice actors just knocked it out the park, outstanding performance bringing to live the different characters. + The story is engaging and the puzzles tend to be on the easy side (which can be good or bad depending on how challenging you like them), personally I think this qualitry make them fit more organically into the world, no moon logic required, so you won't get stuck for hours and the story keeps moving forward. Curiously enough, I didn't encounter any glitches or bugs mentioned in other reviews, I guess I was lucky. At the end of the day I had a great time with this game, I am glad I gave it a chance and now I'm very excited for whatever Revolution will do next.

After 10 years, Foster returns to Union City and finds it bright and gleaming. He starts at ‘look at what Joey did with the city.’, progresses to ‘what did Joey do to the city?’, and ends at: “JOEY, YOU DID WHAT TO THE CITY?!?”. To be clear; this is an adventure game. It is story heavy, and low intensity. There is effectively zero combat, timed puzzles, or much other than dialogue, cut scenes, walking around, and interacting with objects. I don’t know why this game has an ‘action’ tag on it. This game is about as much an action game as Driving Miss Daisy was an action movie. To the game’s credit, it does keep the story moving at a brisk pace and avoids a common adventure game pitfall of item overload. Almost all temporary items get used fairly shortly after being found and my final inventory wasn’t extensive. The game also has a built-in hint system. So this is an easy game to get into if you aren’t generally a fan of ‘click everywhere, try everything’ adventure games. Gameplay will probably run you 6-10 hours, with a lot of dialogue & cut scenes. It might be a lot shorter if you use a guide and skip everything you can, in which case, go play something else you heathen. The game certainly has its share of issues. The dialogue is decent, but predictable. NPC pathing is a bit wonky and leads them to be slide-walking into you at times. Some of the gesture animations are poorly timed, screwing up the impact of the dialogue. The NPC character design suffers from ‘Current Year’-itis. The built-in hint system isn’t very context sensitive, so you can get hints for completed parts of the current objective. It can be an annoyance at times to get to the correct menu choice on a NPC before it wanders away. None of these are show-stoppers, just pebble-in-your-shoe irritants. I don’t typically play adventure games, but I found this decent enough, if tepid. On the gameplay & story alone, this game is a mid to low 3, but it is getting rounded up to 4 for the art.

Played the first game because I thought I might not be too involved in the 2nd if I didn't, but the 2nd has a nice little museum basically encapsulating the 1st game's events. The story is great but not marvelous, the art style is poetically comic like, the hacking is the only real hard part of the game but boy does it require creativity. It is a beautiful game, worth every penny.