Black Skylands - Early Access Review
Developer: Hungry Couch
Publisher: TinyBuild
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: Early Access as of July 9, 2021
MSRP: 19.99
The following product is currently in early access and the final experience may change from what is depicted in this review
It’s dangerous to like a game this much when it’s in early access.
It’s really dangerous to like any game a lot in early access, as a game will change a great deal before it gets to that fabled 1.0. Things will shift, parts of the game someone thought would be a big part turn out to be less consequential, or that thing that felt really inconsequential ends up becoming a big part of how players engage with the game. But Black Skylands is good, very good, and has the potential to be properly huge as it builds. It’s a gorgeous balancing act, managing a sense of adventure with a dark storyline involving war, a high-flying airship combat-and-exploration game with a top-down action-adventure, and the sheer amount of freedom and stuff to do is mindblowing. You can build a town, liberate islands and fight a regime of militaristic air bandits, explore mysteries, aid with research, and do even more, all of it well supported both mechanically and by the story. It’s dizzying, and hopefully will only grow more so.
Black Skylands puts you in the role of Eva, a young and headstrong woman living in a world of floating islands, strange creatures, and airship travel. On Eva’s 11th birthday, her father Richard brings a creature from the eternal storm known as the Swarm to their floating home of Fathership. But tragedy strikes and Eldon, the settlement’s Commander, fires at the creature when it looks like it’s attacking, accidentally wounding Kain, the Chief Hunter and man in charge of security, and wounding his prize falcon. The tragedy causes ripples throughout the community, leading to a massive fracture between the formerly close leaders of Fathership— Richard tries to continue his research into the Swarm with Eva’s brother, Kain forms a group of bloodthirsty bandits called The Falcons and subjugates the island settlements throughout the sky, and Eldon declares war on the Swarm, fighting a desperate fight as the creatures encroach more and more. When Kain’s mortars devastate Eva’s home, she loads up her airship and sets out to find the truth about the swarm and save her people from the Falcons, waging a one-woman war as she explores, rebuilds, and attempts to fight for freedom.
So all of that? That’s the opening and tutorial. The moment you get control of The Behemoth, your first airship, you’ve seen tragedy, an act of war, a ton of dense worldbuilding, and a mass funeral all done up in pixel graphics. What follows is a top-down action adventure game where you, as Eva, fly and hookshot your way around islands, fighting off Kane’s forces and rescuing the islands. In between, you clear the rubble and rebuild from the attack on the Fathership, help a variety of drifters and eccentric characters scattered throughout the islands, solve mysterious puzzles in the form of ancient mechanisms, and upgrade your ship, equipment, weapons, and giant luna moth partner, Luma.
Oh. Yeah. This game has pet giant luna moths. It almost feels like an afterthought. That’s how dense this game is.
But as dense as it seems, it’s economical in its storytelling. Your crafting tutorial is building things back up after Kane’s reckless mortar attack. Controls are incredibly simple: You move with WSAD, use right-click for your grappling hook to traverse long distances, and fly your ship just about anywhere. Story comes not just in the form of numerous sidequests and events, but also in the form of treasure hunts and hidden messages throughout the islands. There’s even some environmental storytelling, with giant bird’s nests and your brother Aaron’s habit of climbing into boxes. It’s easy to learn but has a decent difficulty curve, a lot of the measures like Luma’s ability to carry cargo to and from your ship keeps you from having to backtrack, and when there are only three or four Falcons occupying an island, they helpfully show up on your minimap. It maximizes comfort without completely dropping difficulty.
That balance actually makes things a lot more fun. Combat is a variety of options, everything from dodge-rolling away from an opponent to hookshot away and fire at them while they’re out of range, to stealth-killing an entire island’s worth of bandits, to opening up with your ship’s guns and picking off the bandits before you land. It gives things a remarkable sense of freedom, that you can go do a quest, or harvest materials, or liberate islands as you please. You can just start the game up, zoom wherever you want, and have adventures and find things you might not have discovered. There’s a remarkable sense of go-anywhere do-anything energy that makes you part of this vast world and its inhabitants, rather than simply visiting. Even the way you craft upgrades means you can watch the liberated islands grow and rebuild, creating a sense of familiarity in the wild skies.
All of this is great, because the game is vast and gorgeous. Now, as many games are described as vast and huge, allow me to provide a screenshot:
That creature? It moves beneath your ship. Its fins move. It goes in and out of the clouds. You can’t interact with it, but that’s a part of the scenery that makes the game feel alive. It’s a step further than even Sunless Skies with its dynamic High Wilderness went. The islands are similarly alive, seeing you hookshot and fly between them as wildlife flies to and fro, all of it rendered in utterly gorgeous graphics. There’s a day-night cycle, lighting actually creates trails and reveals things in the scenery, and all of it is beautiful. There’s even biomes as you go along, with frigid mountains and pleasant farming villages among the scenery. When you finally get to fight one of the gigantic creatures inhabiting the Skylands, it confers a threat of danger as the thing you saw darting in and out of the clouds suddenly lands right in front of you, shrieking and swiping at you with its claws. Between this and things like the massive flagships you can liberate for the Fathership, it makes the world feel properly big and dense, even as the tight controls make it simple to navigate, craft, and explore.
But while the game is deep and vast, it shows some of the signs of early access. The further you get in the game, the more the cracks start to show. It’s still good, it’s not like the bugs or anything begin zeroing in, it’s just there’s less to do. While this is to be expected— it’s a huge honking game, not everything can work on every island, it’s annoying to spend time just to feel like things are an afterthought. Similarly, the economy is a little lacking at this phase, meaning you have to go from one end of the Skylands to the other just to get a piece of scrap metal or a gear to get the next upgrade the game comes right out and tells you that you need. That’s another thing, the game loves to tell you “you’re gonna need to upgrade this, this, and this,” but sometimes there’s really no way to get the things it needs. Sure, some of the materials are craftable, but scrap and coal for example must be found in the wild.
The result that Black Skylands is a game that consistently grows with each new update, and I’m excited to see what it does next. But there’s a limit to how much you can see at the moment, as they’re still filling in the blanks as they go. In any case, Black Skylands is an interesting take on the action-adventure and exploration genres, and one that will hopefully continue in the same vein it has.
The Good:
- Vast, massive world to explore
- Tight controls
- Gorgeous pixel graphics
- Dense story with multiple factions
- Deep crafting/tech trees
- Wonderful side quests
The Bad:
- Can run out of content faster than you think
- Bugs and the usual early access issues
Final Score: