Review: Sunless Skies (Steam)
Your Captain and crew must carve out a life between the stars. Will you support her majesty and the establishment, or the working class rebels who yearn for freedom from the Workworlds?
Pros:
- Sunless Skies has beautiful graphics.
- 3407MB download size.
- Steam achievements.
- Full controller support Once turned on in the menu.
- Roguelike gameplay. Every death you pass on the ship to a new captain.
- Gameplay- explore a whole new world, take part in battles against rivals and monsters, discover new lands and do some trading.
- Sunless Skies is such a dark grim world with loads of Lovecraft influences, it’s dark and grim but by God, you wanna see it in all its glory.
- Font size-standard or large.
- Two campaign types-legacy: die and lose your captain. Merciful: die and you can reload/continue.
- Difficulty options-aim assist strength, enemy projectile speed and supply consumption rate.
- Graphics-resolution, fullscreen, texture quality and UI transparency.
- Tutorial tips-show all/disable/reset.
- Sunless Skies has you create a captain-pick your history:revolutionary/auditor/zailor/priest/academic/poet/soldier/Street urchin. Then pick your ambition and avatar. What you pick here will determine any abilities and your starting stats.
- Sunless Skies features Inheritance–permanent unlocks like money, map coverage etc. You clearly get told what you inherit.
- Multiple choice interactions with characters but is also the system used in storytelling.
- Text appears on the sky as you move around.
- Terror- fills up by actions or being in a dangerous area. When it gets too high you will start getting bad events, nightmares and more.
- Buy and sell goods at the many ports.
- Find and recruit unique officers for your crew.
- Balancing act- You have fuel/terror/food meters that go down.
- You can eat your crew!
- Loot is random and can be found or scavenged.
- Earn EXP and level up to unlock additional talents and abilities.
- Every run feels like a self-contained story/event.
- Massive map with memorable locations. There is in fact 3 worlds.
- Engagement and interactions as a whole are so well done. Feels like a choose your own adventure. You pick options and react.
- A lot of fun in a twisted way.
- Cruise control.
- Easy enough controls.
- A lot more streamlined and straight forward over the previous game.
Cons:
- Sunless Skies has weird lockups in the tutorial section.
- Still has small text in places.
- Slow pace.
- Ports are far apart.
- Sunless Skies is difficult.
- Hard to balance the many meters for food and fuel.
- Difficulty spikes.
- Sunless Skies features a lot of reading.
