Forever Skies
Last updated: 2025-04-17
- Engaging survival and crafting gameplay experience.
- Enjoyable airship base building and exploration.
- Immersive post-apocalyptic game atmosphere.
- Repetitive, unrewarding gameplay and world.
- Tedious, unbalanced survival mechanics.
- Unpolished, buggy, and incomplete experience.
Verdict
Mixed
Summary
Positive 68% · Negative 32%. Score: 32 / 100
Positives:
- The game offers engaging survival and crafting mechanics, often compared favorably to titles like Subnautica and Raft. Players enjoy the freedom of exploration, base building, and resource management, finding the gameplay loop addictive and the tech tree satisfying. The developers are also praised for their responsiveness and frequent updates, adding new content and improvements.
- A key feature is the customizable airship, which serves as a mobile base. Players find building, upgrading, and decorating their airship to be a highly enjoyable and rewarding experience. The airship mechanic encourages exploration and provides a unique twist on the survival genre.
- The game creates a strong sense of immersion through its detailed and visually appealing post-apocalyptic world. Reviewers praise the graphics, art style, and sound design for contributing to a captivating atmosphere. The game effectively conveys a feeling of desolation and encourages exploration of the haunting landscapes.
- Many reviewers describe the game as relaxing, chill, and easy to get into. The survival aspects are not overly demanding, allowing for a more laid-back experience. The game is suitable for players who prefer a low-stress environment.
- The game features an interesting and engaging story that unfolds gradually as players explore the world. The lore is revealed through data pads and environmental storytelling, creating an immersive experience. The narrative effectively guides players and motivates them to progress.
Negatives:
- The game suffers from repetitive gameplay loops, environments, and tasks, leading to boredom and a lack of motivation to explore. Many reviewers also negatively compared the game to similar titles like Subnautica and Raft, noting its shortcomings in story, exploration, and overall depth.
- The game's survival mechanics, such as hunger, thirst, and resource gathering, are tedious, grindy, and poorly balanced. Some find them too easy and inconsequential, while others find them too demanding and disruptive to exploration and progression.
- The game lacks clear guidance, tutorials, and explanations, making it difficult for new players to understand the mechanics and progress effectively. This lack of direction leads to frustration and the need to seek external help.
- Many reviewers feel the game is unpolished, buggy, and incomplete, especially given its Early Access status and extended development period. Some express concern that the developers are prioritizing new content over fixing existing issues.
- The game's inventory system is restrictive and poorly designed, with limited space, small stack sizes, and a lack of quality-of-life features. This leads to constant inventory management and frustration.
Gameplay:
- The core gameplay loop revolves around building and upgrading an airship base, exploring the world for resources, and researching new technologies. Many reviewers compare the game to Subnautica and Raft, but with an airship setting. The airship serves as a mobile base for crafting, research, and storage.
- The game features survival mechanics such as managing food, water, health, and diseases. However, some reviewers found these elements to be forgiving or easily bypassed, while others found them tedious due to fast spoilage and constant needs.
- The game features a story that guides the player through the world, but some reviewers found the story progression to be linear and limiting, restricting player agency. Others appreciated the direction provided by the story, preventing them from feeling lost.
- The game involves exploring sky islands and outposts to gather resources, upgrades, and blueprints. Unique mechanics include 'sky fishing' for materials and gardening on the airship.
- The game features an open world with many locations to explore, including procedural generated buildings. The post-apocalyptic landscape is visually appealing, with destructible buildings.
Performance:
- Numerous reviews report significant and widespread performance issues, including low FPS, stuttering, lag, freezing, and crashes, even on high-end systems. These issues are often attributed to poor optimization and become more pronounced in later game stages, with larger ships, or in specific areas like the Dust region. Some reviewers noted that performance has degraded since early access or recent updates.
- Several reviews mention memory leaks that lead to performance degradation over time. This results in increased RAM and GPU utilization, causing frame rate drops and stuttering as the game session progresses. Restarting the game may temporarily alleviate the issue.
- The game appears to be primarily optimized for 1080p resolution, with limited or no support for higher resolutions like 2K or ultrawide monitors. This results in a sub-optimal visual experience on higher resolution displays, with some reviewers reporting out-of-memory errors when attempting to play at higher resolutions.
- The size and complexity of the airship directly impact performance. As players expand and upgrade their airships, the game's performance degrades, even on powerful computers. This is likely due to the increased number of objects and calculations required to render the larger ship.
- Some reviews mention clipping issues with airships and floating objects in the environment. These objects may also have unnecessarily high polygon counts, even at a distance, impacting performance.
Recommendations:
- Many reviewers express mixed feelings, acknowledging the game's potential and enjoyable aspects but noting significant flaws. These flaws include bugs, repetitive gameplay, a grindy nature, and a lack of content. Some reviewers suggest purchasing only on sale or waiting for further updates.
- The game suffers from significant performance and optimization issues, including lag, frame drops, crashes, and memory leaks. Many reviewers recommend waiting for these issues to be resolved before purchasing, especially for players with lower-end PCs. Some reviewers are holding off on playing or replaying until performance improves.
- Many reviewers suggest waiting for the full release or a sale before purchasing the game. They believe the game has potential but needs more content and polish to justify the full price. Some reviewers are looking forward to the full release and plan to revisit the game then.
- The game is frequently compared to other survival titles like Subnautica and Raft, with many reviewers recommending it to fans of those games. Some reviewers feel it successfully captures the essence of those games, while others find it falls short in certain aspects. The airship base-building mechanic is a unique and enjoyable feature.
- Some reviewers express extreme negative sentiment, calling the game terrible or a waste of time. These points often lack specific details and may be influenced by frustration with technical issues. Therefore, the importance score is reduced.
Miscellaneous:
- The game is in early access, with the full release expected in the future. Reviewers acknowledge that the game is still being actively developed, with frequent updates, new content, and story expansions planned. Some reviewers are actively following the development and looking forward to future updates.
- The game includes support for multiple languages, including Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Japanese. Some reviewers also note the availability of user-created language files.
- Some reviewers express concern about the developers' involvement and the game's direction, while others praise their responsiveness. One reviewer states the game is a huge time waster, which is vague and unhelpful.
- The game has a unique and visually appealing art style. Reviewers appreciate the distinct aesthetic.
- The game features distinct locations that show the development team's design effort. However, some reviewers note that there could be more detail in everyday life aspects, and container repetition is noticeable.
