Alright. Black Skylands is done and dusted. tinyBuild sent a pre release key my way, but I prefer waiting until after full release to give games a playthrough and this review is coming in a bit late. Anyway, it was a decent game. I doubt I’ll be thinking about this game a month from now, but it was fun enough.

In looking through the forum, I note that there were many changes from early builds to now, and many of what I’d consider laborious/tedious gameplay mechanics, such as farming, were thankfully removed for the final version. What released is a competent Zelda-like with a nifty world premise.

Which is as follows:

Black Skylands is set in a post apocalyptic where mankinds excesses literally fragmented the world into floating chunks of land in the sky. The why’s and how’s of this are part of the story reveal, so I won’t spoil it. Anyway, mankind lives on these skyborn islands and on ships and stations.

The people of this world have to deal with piracy as well as a hostile group of giant insects known as The Swarm. You play as Eva Mills, daughter of a famous explorer, who through circumstance, becomes the Marshall in the region this game takes place in. You embark on a quest to free your people from the pirates, who are using the citizens as slave labor, while also investigating the Swarm.

Gameplay is split between ship exploration and combat (which has some similarities to Rebel Galaxy) and island exploration, which is where the Zelda style gameplay is evident, via combat, pacing, and puzzle solving. None of it is particularly complex, although for me, steering the ships had a bit of a learning curve before they became completely intuitive.

There are a few different ships to unlock along with their weapons, and both can be upgraded in stages. Eva is also well armed, and there is a reasonably large amount of weapons to fund or purchase in your basic categories (shotty, rifle, assault rifle, sniper rifle, submachine gun, pistol, rocket launcher). She can have three equipped at a time. They can be both upgraded and modified via parts found throughout the game.

You also have four slots to use fir amulets, which serve as buffs; and two slots for special abilities, from turrets to shield to more spell-like functions.

There is some very lite base building, and progressing your base will also unlock upgrade tiers for the ships and weapons.

There are also numerous quests, which do impact the world in variable ways.

Black Skylands does everything well, and in a way that could be considered almost casual. I say ‘almost’ because some of the boss battles do present a challenge. Overall though, I thought the game was fairly easy on default settings.

Graphics are pretty cool, isometric and vacillates between pixelated goodness and cartoon-ish with solid detail. The screen can however get pretty busy in combat, and I found it easy to lose track of Eva during certain sequences. Audio is all effects and music, and I didn’t find any of it to be particularly noteworthy. You could easily just turn the volume down and enjoy your own music, podcasts, what have you.

The story was pretty cool, but I’d also say that there is a distinct lack of real depth which holds the game back a bit.

It was Steam Deck compatible with no adjustments being necessary.

Is this game worth playing? Yes. Is it a must play? Definitely not. It will provide roughly 15-20 hours of gameplay depending on how thorough you choose to be, and cheevos are all easily had if you don’t mind doing everything the game has to offer. My recommendation would be to grab this on sale. Cost vs value is there at full price, but I don’t think the relative lack of depth warrants a full price purchase.