Forever Skies Reviews

At its core, this game possesses all the fundamentals needed for success. With roughly 20 hours of playtime, it doesn't overstay its welcome.

I really love the idea of this game, but it's so repetitive that I found myself looking at my phone as I gathered the same materials from identical outposts over and over. I was excited about the idea of an airship, but the airship is pointless without rewarding exploration, and everywhere I went felt like a copy and paste of the last place I just left. The truth is so many other games do survival, exploration, and building so much better (Ark, Subnautica, etc.) that playing this game just made me want to go play one of those instead.

Raft did it better. There is too much copy and paste all over the place, I question why anyone would release a game like that, its something an Early Access game would do. As for the endings its annoying vague I would have liked to see a flash forward into the future to see an actual result rather than a dumb message saying no ending is right or wrong and you won't know the outcome. I also complain you could have done both endings at the same time there was no why reason you couldn't. Id go into actual details but that would be spoilers.

Not at all worth it unless it's 90% off. Full of bugs. Clunky. Terrible inventory management setup. No quality of life considerations, just hours of wandering around in an ugly environment trying to fulfill pointless uninspired game mechanics.

Performance is good after the last patch. Played from start to finish on it, completing the game. That said, there are some real pacing issues when it comes to unlocking some QOL- By the time the game allows you to unlock the good stuff to make the best airship, the game will be over and there will be no real point building the best airship. This game sort of sells itself mostly on upgrading your airship, and I never really felt there was a best time to go overboard on it before the final missions of the game, leading to a failure of the titular mechanic holding things up. Oh, and I actually did have to use the unstuck button because I genuinely got stuck in place unable to move at one point, in a 1.0 release. So take that as you will.

I'm so mixed on this game. On one hand I really did enjoy most of my time with the game. The story started out with me really intrigued by why this dust was everywhere, and why couldn't we go anywhere. I also really enjoyed the building system. It was really easy to add things to the ship and move things around. I liked the art direction of the game and I thought it was a really well done game visually. On the other hand though, I did have a lot of issues with the game overall. The story, while starting out interesting, felt like it fizzled out. The ending, which I will not spoil, really fell flat for me. I was also streaming the game and another viewer said it completed with a whimper. While the building is fun, finding the blueprints isn't always fun. Every tower you visit is almost the same with very little difference, and not every type of tower is guaranteed to hold the blueprints you need. I also never found an upgraded backpack on my play through. This method of unlocking things was frustrating. I don't mind having some RNG element to finding things, but when it's coupled with so much space between towers and they are all bland and roughly the same, it fell flat after a while. I also had massive performance issues with the game in certain areas. I have an overkill system for this game, and I was running it in windowed mode (for streaming due to my native 21:9 monitor resolution) at 1080p, and I was getting so much stuttering that I was getting very frustrated. This mostly was down when you're below the dust so it wasn't that often, but when it was bad, it was REALLY bad. Also on my last stream or 2, the game itself out of nowhere was blooming like crazy. Almost like the lights went up to 200%. Had never happened in a dozen play sessions before that. So this is where I have a hard time recommending the game. I enjoyed it, but I think you have to go into it knowing that while it's technically in full release, there are still some issues with it. The developer has stated they are working on updates and they heard the feedback people were having. I can't recommend the game based on what they might do, but if games like this are in your wheelhouse, you might enjoy it. I felt like I got my $30 out of it and I am happy I played it. Just have a hard time recommending it currently unless you are aware of these things going in.

Finally a fresh take on a survival. It is extremely fun and extremely beautiful. The devs found a way to make something new that works. The gameplay is fun and it has easy mechanics. Cant recommend it enough.

The idea of a mobile base-builder set in an airship had a lot of potential... but the game designers clearly thought "Raft but on a blimp" was an acceptable way to try to fulfill that potential. The story is disjointed, confusing, and short, the characters were completely forgettable, the setting was barely explained at all, the explanations for gameplay mechanics ranged from 'vague hints' to 'won't admit that this mechanic even exists', the world was populated by copy-pasting the same five areas all across the landscape, and the visuals were completely insufficient for a game that takes place in an airship.

So..... bought and played this ages ago before 1.0 came out. Just played through the entire game in 1.0 in the last 3 days and.... TLDR: Cool premise, buggy and frustrating, dident feel worth the exploration. English localization is uhm, spotty a lot of the time. The airship operations are cool!!! Its obviously inspired by raft and subnautica as everyone mentions... but it lacks a serious... intrigue? There are a lot of little log tidbits thrown around on different towers/elsewhere but it all feels kind of shallow in a weird way.... hard to explain without really revealing too much. The biggest things that annoyed me the most were how absolutely manual everything is. You have to babysit absolutely everything on your ship, all the new upgraded and fancy unlocks are the same way except the automatic extractor (that one works awesome). Farming is an absolute nightmare and you unlock watering stuff SO late in the game that you can just speed through the rest of the game anyway, which makes building up anything feel pointless. The deck extractor needed be open like... quite a bit sooner like it was pre 1.0. The other big bit that made me frustrated is how a huge amount of terrain, especially terrain on story monuments, HAS no collision. Something that looks like you can jump or stand on it ends up making you fall through the world, in places that arent even blocked off by walls. Underdust locations were cool but like, it all felt like you were in some industrial factory 5000 percent of the time, it all looked the same even if your 20kms apart. Combat was annoying, took way too many shots to actually do anything unless you had the actually expensive bolts, and you take more damage from falling 4 feet than getting wailed on by a mantis for a few seconds. Unnecessary and keeping it full exploration would have been nicer, it would have been cooler to have more threats to the actual airship than the even more annoying scrapwings. The airship kept bugging out 50/50 when landing or bumping into something, making the anchor icon vanish and being held in place until you quit the game, also turning the engines off while fueled lets them work indefinitely without consuming fuel?

Out of my playtime in this game, I enjoyed about 10% of it. The rest is just not quite there. Few points, although it's not an exhaustive list of gripes: 1 Copy pasted locations ruin all the immersion. Compare to Subnautica, with hand crafted world that feels real. This is a short point, but the most impactful one 1.1 Since the immersion is lacking, all the decorative stuff and various room variations fell completely pointless - why would I want to personalize environment that I feel no connection to? And you need to put in a lot of effort to unlock all the construction variants, going through multiple - you guessed it- copy pasted locations 2. The game needed one last layer of polish - a lot of elements that feel like they were intended to have a point, but something didn't make it into the final draft, and vestigial elements just left hanging. Physics have a minor jank. Enemy AI is terrible. 3. ** "Story" SPOILERS** [spoiler] The story is just absolutely flat. You get periodic messages from the spaceship telling you how everyone is struggling, and how they need your help, and believe in you. Those are so monotone and empty that I was sure that there will be a reveal that they are fake, the people in question either died long ago or never existed in the first place, which would be a fun (if a bit predictable) twist. Instead - there's no twist, it's just that your friends and family are a bunch of people who communicate like soulless puppets. The game really failed to make me feel any emotion whatsoever about anyone[/spoiler] All this and more made the game absolutely unimmersive, which is critical for a game like this. The core idea of a mobile base that you build out and bring with you, upgrade and refine it - that is solid. But there's just not enough flesh on that particular bone