Black Skylands Review Summary

Great Value & Enjoyable Experience: The game offers significant value for its price, providing a fun and relaxing experience. It's praised for its engaging gameplay loop, appealing visuals, and overall polished feel, making it a worthwhile purchase, especially on sale.

Beautiful Pixel Art & Atmosphere: The game's pixel art style is consistently highlighted as beautiful, detailed, and visually captivating, contributing significantly to the overall atmosphere. This aesthetic, combined with the unique steampunk setting, creates an immersive and charming world.

Fluid & Dynamic Combat: The combat system, encompassing both on-foot gunplay and aerial ship battles, is highly praised for its fluidity, dynamism, and responsiveness. The seamless transitions between these combat modes and the variety of weapons contribute to a satisfying and engaging experience.

Engaging & Emotional Story: The story is consistently described as engaging, well-written, and surprisingly mature, with interesting twists and a satisfying, often emotional, ending. It effectively immerses players in the world and characters.

Extensive Weapon Customization: The weapon and equipment modification systems are a major highlight, offering extensive customization options. Players appreciate the variety of weapons, mods, and the ability to tailor their loadouts, which adds strategic depth and replayability.

Weak Story & Ending: The game's story is widely criticized for being simplistic, cliché, predictable, and unengaging, with poor pacing and underdeveloped characters. The ending is particularly noted as rushed, unsatisfying, and often illogical, failing to provide a compelling conclusion or emotional impact. Additionally, the music is sparse and bland, contributing to a lack of atmosphere.

Repetitive Gameplay Loop: The core gameplay loop, primarily involving island liberation and resource gathering, becomes highly repetitive and monotonous, leading to boredom and a feeling of artificial length. This issue is exacerbated by a lack of depth in features and mission variety.

Removed/Simplified Features: Many features and mechanics present in the Early Access version, such as crafting, farming, and ship customization, were significantly cut or simplified in the full release. This resulted in a game that feels underbaked, less complex, and missing promised content, leading to disappointment among players who experienced earlier builds.

Clunky Controls: Both airship and on-foot controls are frequently described as clunky, sluggish, and unintuitive, making combat and navigation frustrating. This significantly hinders the enjoyment of aerial combat and general movement, often leading to accidental deaths or getting stuck.

Inconsistent Difficulty & Raids: The game's difficulty balance is inconsistent, with some sections being too easy even on hard mode, while others, particularly late-game raids and certain boss fights, become frustratingly difficult due to unfair mechanics or overwhelming enemy numbers. Raid mode is also noted for being repetitive and buggy.

Dual Combat System: The game features a dual combat system, alternating between top-down airship battles and on-foot twin-stick shooter combat on floating islands. Players explore, liberate islands, and engage in both aerial and ground-based encounters.

Playtime & Progression: The game offers a moderate playtime, typically ranging from 10 to 20 hours for the main story and up to 30 hours for 100% completion. While some find it repetitive, others note the grind is manageable due to integrated exploration.

Resource & Upgrade Systems: The game incorporates extensive resource management and upgrade systems. Players collect various materials to craft and enhance weapons, upgrade their airship, and improve their main base, the Fathership.

Open-World Exploration & Style: The game is a top-down, pixel-art open-world adventure. It emphasizes free exploration of floating islands and combines elements of action, RPG, and shooter genres, often compared to titles like Hotline Miami or classic Zelda.

Changed Upgrade Systems: The ship and Fathership upgrade systems underwent significant changes from Early Access to full release. The current system simplifies customization, with upgrades often shared across ships and Fathership utility reduced compared to earlier versions.

Bugs and Performance Issues: Players report a variety of bugs, ranging from minor glitches to critical issues like characters getting stuck due to collision problems. Performance inconsistencies and frame rate drops are also noted, indicating optimization issues.

Good Steam Deck Performance: The game generally performs well on the Steam Deck, with some minor lag spikes occurring when a large number of enemies are present on screen. This suggests good, but not perfect, optimization for the portable device.

Low Hardware Requirements: The game is well-optimized for a wide range of hardware, running smoothly even on systems with lower specifications. This makes it accessible to a broader audience.

Good Physics Implementation: Players generally find the game's physics to be well-implemented and satisfactory. This positive aspect contributes to the overall gameplay experience.

Highly Recommended Game: Many reviewers highly recommend the game, often suggesting it's a worthwhile purchase, especially when on sale. They praise its unique blend of genres and engaging experience.

Buy on Sale: A significant number of reviews suggest purchasing the game during a sale or at a discounted price, indicating that while enjoyable, its full price might be a deterrent for some players.

Early Access Version Preferred: Several players strongly recommend playing the Early Access version over the full release, stating it offered a more complete or different experience. Some reviews also mention that older positive reviews might refer to a different game version.

Desire for More Content: Players express a strong desire for more content, including sequels, DLCs, or further updates, indicating satisfaction with the core game and a wish for its expansion.

Niche Appeal: The game is recommended for specific player preferences, such as those who enjoy exploration, steampunk aesthetics, airship combat, or a solo experience similar to 'Sea of Thieves'.

Average game, lacks depth: The game is considered average with potential for improvement and expansion. Reviewers felt it lacked depth and content, suggesting more story and gameplay elements could enhance the experience.

Revert Early Access changes: There's a strong sentiment regarding changes from Early Access to the full release, with many wishing for the return of removed features and the previous story, which was often preferred for its narrative depth.

More airship focus needed: Players expected a more airship-centric experience, with desires for more airship combat, exploration, and larger, more varied ship options and enemies. The current implementation felt limited compared to expectations.

Good value on sale: The game is generally seen as a good value, especially when purchased on sale. Reviewers found it enjoyable enough to play past the refund period, highlighting its decent graphics, gameplay, and audio.

Excellent visual style: The game's aesthetic, visual style, atmosphere, and lore are highly praised. Reviewers found the setting immersive and the art style well-executed, contributing significantly to the game's appeal.