Black Skylands

Review

Black Skylands is one of those blast-out indie titles that gets you hooked instantly. Black Skylands brings you a great mixture of gameplay genres, from top-down bullet hell RPG to sky pirating action-adventure.

And not just the gameplay, Black Skylands also features some prominent characters and a motive-driven storyline with great attention to dialogues, story-arc, and character progression.

You get to take control of Eva Mills, a tenacious young sky captain, and venture out with her as she reclaims her homeland for her people from the notorious bloodthirsty bandits and the vicious creatures that inhabit these lands.  

A grand adventure awaits Eva as she sets sail on the high skies.

Plot: Many years ago, Earth turned into thousands of islands floating in the Sky. In the new world, the people of Aspya used to live in peace… until it all came to an end.

After a scientific discovery went wrong and Aspya was swarmed by ruthless monstrous creatures, the people of Aspya were plunged into a struggle for survival against the Swarms, a terrifying species who know no mercy and feel no remorse.

Here’s where our young heroine steps in, Eva — proud daughter of the Earners; new sky captain who just got her own ship. Not only must Eva stop the Swarm's onslaught, but she must also stand against the Falcons (a brutal gang of bandits) led by the cruel and arrogant Kain.

After seizing power in the Earners' lands, Eva must take up arms to protect her people against all odds.

Gameplay: Black Skylands lets you set sail on a Skyship as Eva Mills, a young captain on a mission to restore peace in the sky lands of Aspya. While working towards restoring the peace, Eva will have to make some tough decisions and face numerous foes against all odds.

The game starts off with a brief play-through while Aspya was at peace, giving the players a chance of understanding the layout of the game, of what might they expect and encounter.

The game progresses through stages set by the storyline, where you have to gather Intel on the enemy, rebuild the fathership and your own ship while fighting off the bandits.

Skyships: As the name suggests, the game is all about that mid-air exploration, mixed with some intense air-to-air and air-to-ground combat. For the most part, the game does a great job of the whole “flying the skyship” aspect.

The ships are slow, lightweight, and jam-packed with oversized guns. At first, the flying experience is quite unforgiving as you’re ship is unarmored, slow and vulnerable.

With steady progression, you’ll start gathering enough resources to upgrade all the features, but it won’t make you invincible. You’ll need to be on your toes constantly; evade and counter is the name of the game. Luckily, the enemy weapons are as slow or slower than yours.

On top of the challenging slow-moving air-to-air combat, there are a ton of flying derbies floating around the sky, and in the heat of battle, these derbies can cause some mighty headaches.

Gunplay: Black Skylands top-down gunplay is one of the best things I’ve encountered in a while. You get to play around with a number of well-balanced weapons and weapon modes.

The guns are not overpowered, and it feels great to dodge incoming fire and counter attack.  Combined with its limited-range grappling hook and melee attacks, Black Skylands on-foot combat feels rich, chaotic, and brutally insane.

But I hated the large crosshair and bullet spread indicator, which was unnecessary and we could’ve just used a simple tiny crosshair instead.

Base-building and inventory system: As you travel throughout the Skylands and gather resources you can either store them in your ship or in the warehouses scattered throughout the map.

After returning to the fathership you can just pick up your stuff and start crafting; it’s a handy inventory system letting you have access to your items from anywhere.

The base-building system is nothing that we haven’t encountered before, but the great thing is building up your base, your defenses and the necessary infrastructure that impacts the game and contributes to your gameplay with mods, materials, and consumable items.

World design: Black Skylands plays out over an impressive cluster of scattered islands, colonies, and floating skyships, surrounded by bright colorful skies full of flying creatures, and ships.

The way the game is designed, and items are placed, makes the game very claustrophobic and chaotic during intense fight scenes.

Sound designs and background music: Right off the bat, the background music feels super generic and bleached out. Doesn’t add anything to the game and gets repetitive very quickly.

On the other hand, I like what they did with the sound effects. The sound effects were neither too loud nor dialed down; they played out great throughout some intense fight scenes.

Review written by BiteMexD for Zeepond.com!

Black Skylands Steam Store Page