Lost Skies, much like its predecessor Worlds Adrift, is all about fulfilling that primal urge of thrusting yourself into the unknown in search of riches, long lost civilizations, and most importantly, a chance to shoot a cannonball straight into a would-be god's face! While Lost Skies already shows a lot of promise in this regard, the unfortunate truth is that it has cut so many corners in order to launch into Early Access that it now resembles a well-polished sphere.
Without a shred of exaggeration, I don't think I've had a single 10-minute chunk of gameplay where I didn't encounter at least one major annoyance, and at the time of writing I've been playing for 28 hours! Saying this genuinely hurts me because when Lost Skies behaves itself and you get to sail across the skies in a ship of your own design it's incredibly compelling. If it wasn't I wouldn't have been playing it non-stop for the past few days, after all. But when my character randomly glitches through my ship and becomes a Lovecraftian monstrosity twisting and contorting itself through the cold vacuum of space, all I can really do is sigh.
Video version of this review (~18 minutes)
What if ships could fly?
I'll talk more about these problems as we go, but for now let's answer what is Lost Skies at its core? To put it simply, Lost Skies is all about plundering a variety of shattered, floating islands for new ingredients and recipes, using said thingamabobs to build all sorts of fancy gear for yourself and your ship, and then venturing into even more hostile areas to get even better stuff. It's a fairly simple gameplay loop, but it works really well.
There is just something innately satisfying about taking a skyship that's just a pile of wood and rusted metal and slowly, bit by bit, transforming it into a mighty warship. And since you control every single part of the process, both in terms of building the actual ship and choosing what sort of equipment to give it, it's hard not to get emotionally invested in it. This caught me totally by surprise because I usually go for form over function (gestures at my Factorio review and its misshapen flying bricks), yet in Lost Skies I actually took the time and effort to make my Stingray look at least slightly presentable. I'm sadly still terrible at design so it does look kinda wonky, but it's the thought that counts!
It's messy, but it's mine!
Each ship consists of multiple sails that help propel the ship or maneuver in certain directions, as well as engines that give it some much needed power. It's an interesting system to mess around with since the position and angle of each element actually matters. Placing the sails backwards or the engines at a wrong angle will end up being worse for you than if you just tried to paddle your way through the sky. You can freely move things around while in a shipyard so mistakes aren't hard to fix, but even so I did like having to put at least a little bit of thought into my ship's design as it made the whole thing feel like MY ship.
The act of flying the ship around is also quite fun and really gives off the feeling that you're piloting something massive. Mechanically, however, it's a fairly simple affair. You can turn left and right, go up or down, and shift your nose in any direction. That's pretty much it, but since the ship is big and bulky your commands will take a little bit of time to show any real effect. You'll need to react to things before they're right in your face, and figuring out the when and how is going to be what separates those decorating hillsides with ship parts and those deftly squeezing in between floating archipelagos. It's a fun skill to learn!
While I'm quite happy with how the ships work, even in this very first version, they do have one little issue that came to bother me a lot more than I ever thought it would. Once you start the ship and move forward, your engines will instantly kick in and you'll be good to go. However, the sails will not! So if you're like me and you have sails spread across the entity of your ship, every single time you go anywhere you'll have to manually raise all of them. But you know what's funny? When you go to a full stop the sails will close automatically! So why in the world do I have to squeeze myself in between all of my crafting tables in order to raise them one by one when the helm apparently has the ability to control them? Just let me fly around without all this needless busywork!
What secrets do the floating islands hold?
Once your airship reaches one of the numerous floating islands it's going to be time for one of my favorite things in gaming - exploration! Each island is seemingly hand-crafted and offers some kind of a mixture of puzzles, combat and parkour gauntlets spread across all sorts of scenery. Sometimes you'll be rummaging through the ruins of an ancient civilization, and other times you'll be hopping across rocks floating above an endless expanse of nothing while giant statues glare ominously at you. My favorite are the islands that look perfectly normal from the outset, yet contain a myriad of secrets reserved exclusively for those that sense something is off and decide to do some hardcore snooping.
Just as an example, there is one island with a cool-looking industrial machine at its shattered center. You'll find a couple of pieces of loot there, and if you're not observant that'll be it. But if you sniff around you'll find that not only does the decrepit house contain numerous hidden passages full of loot, but also switches that will eventually open a path to a massive, underground alien ruin that leads to some kind of a command center. When I reached the end of that 'dungeon' I was ecstatic! All I wanted to do was learn more about this whole facility. Who built it, why, and why did they need to hide it so well?
As luck would have it, I eventually found a chunky data log lying on some kind of terminal. Excited I clicked on it as quickly as I could, only to then remember that for the past 20 hours every single data log, and I mean literally every single one, has been broken. The best bit? Not only did clicking on this super-duper hidden data log reveal zero information to me, but it also killed nearly all sound in my game from that point onward. I could occasionally still hear gunfire, the background music and the endless squealing of enemies, but that was it. Everything else would randomly fade in and out and so I was forced to spend my last few hours with the game in some kind of sensory purgatory as punishment for my trespass.
A story so shocking it made me go deaf
And that's pretty much the story of Lost Skies. Great ideas marred by endless technical problems. How can you truly enjoy exploration when it's impossible to tell if you're just being dumb and unable to figure out a complicated puzzle or if the whole thing is just broken and you're wasting your time. Are you willing to spend 30 minutes to find out? If you're right it could be an amazing underground complex like what I discovered, or it could be a switch that's buried into a rock and is thus inaccessible and so all you've done is waste your time and sanity.
Another, albeit smaller, set of issues I had with the exploration was the enemy variety and balance. Outside of special circumstances all you'll ever be fighting is flying manta rays, drones and turrets. As you go visit more dangerous islands they'll become stronger and shift in color a little bit, but they'll still essentially be the same enemies you've been fighting from minute zero. The scaling is also a bit messed up since the enemies go up in damage way faster than you do, so it's very easy to end up in a situation where it takes you 10+ bullets from a magnum-style weapon to kill an enemy while they kill you in one or two hits.
While annoying, these types of issues I am far more lenient on because it's normal Early Access stuff. The balance can be tweaked easily enough as it's just numbers, and adding new enemies and locations as time goes on will give the game some much needed variety. The seemingly endless bugs, however, I have no idea how the developers will be able to fix in any reasonable time frame, but I do hope they manage to pull off some miracles as the gameplay itself is great... when it works.
A grappling hook makes every game better
Nowhere does this apply more than with the movement mechanics. In order to complement its exploration of highly complex environments Lost Skies gives players access to a character that is able to climb damn near anything without ever getting tired, a glider so you can laugh in the face of gravity, as well as a personal favorite of mine - a grappling hook. And mind you, this isn't your boring 'you can only grapple to predetermined spots' kind of a grappling hook. Oh, no! Instead, it's a physics based grappling hook that gives you the freedom to swing around like Spider-man, the ability to scale insanely tall cliffs in seconds, and a solid chance to earn some permanent brain damage by slamming face-first into a wall at mach 10 because you misjudged your swing.
Once you wrap your head around how your character moves even simply navigating the environment becomes an entertaining little mini-game. And that is high praise, because if the basic act of navigating the world is fun, then the game has some floating-rock-solid foundations. The only problem I really have with the movement is the fact that your character is a bit too sticky when moving near cliffs - perhaps because the developers were worried players would yeet themselves off the map by being careless. Personally, I would like an option to turn this auto-grab off so that I can swing with impunity and build up ridiculous speeds, even if this does mean I might occasionally splatter myself on a wall or launch myself into the void that lies below. It's a risk I am more than willing to take in exchange for smoother grappling.
You can never go wrong with a grappling hook!
Crafting and my descent into madness
As is tradition with these types of games, Lost Skies also features an extensive crafting system spanning a huge variety of materials and items you can make with them. And these materials are not just fluff either. Different metals, for example, have different effects on the quality of your equipment. Depending on what sort of materials you use you can change everything from the item's durability to its power or weight. While there are generally 'correct' options to go for in each piece, you don't have infinite resources so a little bit of a compromise is always going to be necessary, which helps keep things interesting. Aside from that, the crafting system is fairly standard and should be instantly recognizable to veterans of the genre.
There is, however, a pretty big oversight with the crafting system. You get heaps of different items thrust upon you, many of which take up a lot of space in your inventory, yet there is no good system in order to sort and store them. You have to do everything manually via tiny, tiny chests that are likely to get scattered all across your ship. Then, when you want to build something you'll have to manually find which piece of nearly identical metal is the one you need, grab it along with any other ingredients, and only then do the actual crafting.
If that sound super annoying to you, you would be correct! It's actually insane that Lost Skies doesn't have either a unified storage you can just dump everything into, or at the very least the ability to link chests with crafting stations so you don't have to frantically run around like a coffee-addled squirrel every time you want to craft anything. Fix that and the crafting will instantly become a lot more engaging as you'll actually want to spend time thinking about what items to build with which ingredients, rather than just picking the first thing you see so you can stop dumpster diving and get back to the fun stuff - flying around and exploring the world!
The crafting desperately needs a quality-of-life focused update
Pervasive performance problems
I spend a fair bit of time playing ancient cRPG games that look like you took a bad photo of a casual DnD table and then smeared it in vaseline, so I don't particularly care about graphics, but even I couldn't help but notice that Lost Skies' visuals are a bit of a mixed bag. Most of the stuff that is on top of the ground has a simple and colorful look to it, and while the art style is a bit too clean for my liking, it's generally stylish enough that I wouldn't even think about complaining.
Where the problem arises is with many of the bigger ground and wall textures - the stuff you see outside of the big set pieces. I don't know much about visual design, but to me it looks like someone took a tiny texture and then streeeeeeeeched it out over a gigantic area, with the end result being an ugly, blurry mess that looks so bad compared to your highly detailed character that I just can't overlook it.
If this was done in order to help with performance I could understand, but Lost Skies' performance is also terrible. Approaching new islands, even if you're not going anywhere near them, makes the game seize up for a couple of seconds as all of the new assets load. I eventually reduced my settings to medium in order to minimize this, but I could never get rid of it. I've also had frequent freezes in the middle of random actions, seemingly unaffected by what's happening around me. I could be picking flowers in a field and the game would just take a 5 second break.
Unsurprisingly given the fast-paced movement options and combat that skews towards big bursts of damage, these stutters got me killed quite a few times. Then I would respawn, my body would glitch into my ship, the whole thing would explode, and I would be forced to alt-f4 in order to reload the last auto-save from 15 minutes ago. I'd then spend 10 of those minutes flying back to where I was, and only then, finally, would I be allowed to actually continue with my adventures. That sort of nonsense would be somewhat fine if it happened once every dozen hours, but when it happens consistently it just crushes the very concept of fun under its glitchy boots.
Closing thoughts
Reviewing games like Lost Skies genuinely hurts my soul. It's not some terrible asset flip or lazy cash grab that I can rag on, we have a few laughs and everyone just moves on. It's quite the contrary. I love what it's doing and I can see the heaps of potential behind it. I want to recommend it, to have people experience the cool stuff that I have, but it's currently so unfinished and broken that I cannot in good conscience do so. You'll just end up like me - constantly yo-yoing between having fun and being frustrated due to the endless sea of bugs and jank, and let me tell you, that's not the kind of stress you want in your life.
However, despite its name, it's not actually a lost cause. With a couple of patches, and probably a couple of months as well, I can definitely see Lost Skies becoming the game it was always meant to be. I certainly hope it does, because even with all of the problems I still managed to put in nearly 30 hours before I got worn down, and that's not something I'd do for any ol' game.
[Note]: I've also taken the opportunity to create a Beginner's Guide covering the most important strategies and tricks I learned throughout my playthrough. So if you'd like your first time with Lost Skies to be as nice and pleasant as the shattered world would allow, I'd welcome you to give it a look.