Sky Oceans Wings for Hire Fails to Capture the Magic of Skies of Arcadia Due to Frustrating Combat and Lack of Technical Polish Despite a Charming Visual Style
Nostalgia is one of the more powerful forces in marketing. When an indie developer says they want to recreate the glory days of JRPGs in the same vein as the Dreamcast titles, particularly the piratical airborne stylings of Skies of Arcadia, genre veterans will immediately perk up. Sky Oceans aims to bring back that late 90s and early 2000s feeling of floating islands, sky pirates, and turn based starfighter action. While there is a clear attempt at that, the game never manages to take off.
You play as Glenn Windwalker, a young jet pilot who has his world torn apart when the violent Alliance attacks his home planet. Revenge forces Glenn to form a flying team of motley skirmishers to take the fight back to the terrorists. While there is some good groundwork in the universe, it feels like a familiar combination of Studio Ghibli heartfelt storytelling reinforced by tried and true RPG story beats.
Unfortunately, the narrative feels like dead weight because the script is dead on arrival. The game tackles dark themes such as the death of parents and the slaughter of loved ones, but the delivery is so dry that it is difficult to engage with the serious cutscenes. The characters simply make no impression and appear unchanged by the tragedy surrounding them.
The presentation feels like several budgets stacked on top of each other. The exaggerated anime style character portraits and moving cutscenes are nicely animated and bring charm to the experience. The background music is also well composed, making exploration feel more epic.
However, once you look past that level of polish, the visuals fall apart. The 3D in game characters look like they belong in a Nintendo DS title as they are blocky and lack fluid animation. The dead eyed grins are particularly off putting, especially when a character smiles during a scene involving the murder of the protagonist's father. Exploration is drab and featureless with massive pop in issues that ruin the immersion of flying.
Instead of fighting on the ground with swords, battles are fought in the sky with aerial dogfights. This is a lovely idea on paper. You can see the turn order and plan when to evade or attack. In practice, the combat drags on forever. Regular hits are weak and have a ridiculously high miss rate. You will often find yourself completely outmatched in one fight, only to dominate after gaining a single level. Navigation is sluggish and unresponsive, making dungeons and the overworld frustrating to traverse.
One of the biggest issues is the complete lack of polish. The game is packed with bugs, such as music stopping in the middle of a fight. Camera motion is unresponsive and often counters the movements of the player. Menus occasionally go off screen, and the auto scrolling textboxes move too fast to read, forcing players to restart dialogue if they miss a line.
Pc Version Tested.
Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from Devs
