Forever Skies Review - Trouble with Turbulence

Most post-apocalyptic games have you building out a base and exploring the world. Forever Skies is part of the growing subset of survival games where your base is a mobile ship that you take with you around the world. In this Forever Skies review, I'll go over my experience traveling above a ruined Earth, warts and all.

Forever Skies takes place on a futuristic Earth that has been overrun by the "Dust", an amalgamation of mutated flora and fauna that has rendered the surface toxic and uninhabitable. This has also caused the birth of new diseases, including the "Grey Plague", a terrible malady that is bringing humanity to the brink of extinction — and now, it's up to you to cure it.

Taking to the Skies

Your adventure begins after emerging from a drop pod that descended from the Ark, a space station that is home to the handful of humans who have escaped Earth entirely. The Grey Plague is slowly killing them, and you are their only hope to fix it. But first, you'll have to get on your feet.

As with many survival games, Forever Skies starts you off on a tutorial tower where you learn the basics of the game on foot. You'll assemble a basic Airship toward the end of this tutorial zone and take to the skies in search of answers and valuable crafting materials.

Much like Raft, your Airship is both your means of transportation and your base. You'll only have a small airship with one balloon and one engine at the beginning; eventually, you could build it out to a multi-level leviathan with multiple balloons, engines, turbines, and automated turrets that collect debris to fuel your crafting.

You'll be limited to a handful of different types of towers in the early hours of the game. Adding some turbines and unlocking key crafting recipes will let you access taller buildings and open up new areas of the map. Eventually, though, you'll have to descend below the surface.

Delving Into the Dust

The early parts of Forever Skies are all about landing at towers to get the raw materials you need for your airship. Your main concerns will be keeping up your survival stats, building your airship, and avoiding falling off a tower into the ground below. Eventually, the story will take you to your first underground area in the "Underdust."

The surface of Earth is a very different beast. The air is totally unbreathable, and you'll need to rely on a small oxygen tank to survive, supplemented by oxygen stations throughout the Underdust that you'll have to power up.

Early Underdust areas won't have much in the way of hazards save for the oxygen limit and the occasional harmful flora. Later areas, though, will have you fighting against actual enemies. Combat isn't all that difficult, especially when you're using a ranged weapon.

The Underdust is often home to crafting materials that can't reliably be found elsewhere, such as Crystals, as well as trading kiosks. Although you only need to visit each of these dangerous locations once, you'll often find yourself returning to them multiple times to fuel your crafting and Airship building — all the more so when you're playing multiplayer.

Problems with Performance

The Underdust is indeed filled with mystery, but it presents another problem — these handcrafted story locations often tanked my framerate.

The PC I used to play the 1.0 beta version exceeded the recommended requirements on the Steam page on every metric — I have a much better processor and graphics card, and more than enough RAM. For some reason I don't understand, however, my framerate would randomly drop to 10 FPS or worse in many of these Underdust areas.

A similar phenomenon happened with bad weather. Whenever it rained, my framerate would go right into the gutter. Saving and restarting the game seemed to help, so my gut tells me that there may be a memory leak or some other unresolved optimization issue.

I was not alone, either; I spent some of my time playing in multiplayer with my girlfriend and a good friend. The three of us all met the minimum and recommended requirements, but our framerate would go to hell in the Underdust, and while it was raining.

This wasn't the only performance issue I encountered, mind; at a certain point, adding or removing pieces from your Airship caused the game to freeze for a moment. As with most survival games, it seems that Forever Skies gets a little bit laggy when you start building big.

Forever Skies Review | Final Thoughts

I'll close out this Forever Skies review with an inevitable comparison: yes, Forever Skies feels a lot like Raft. You take your base with you, going from story location to story location and stopping at smaller points of interest along the way to collect crafting materials and decorations for your ship.

If you (and your friends) enjoyed Raft, you'll find a lot to love in Forever Skies. If you've never played a game like this before, the sci-fi setting and light first-person shooter elements may be easier for you to pick up than the coconut technology found in Raft.

Forever Skies is a fine game in its own right, and Far From Home may very well deliver some excellent post-launch content. However, all of this great game design and fun exploration is hampered by performance issues that should have been sorted out before launching a 1.0 version; one hopes that the developers will fix these problems sooner rather than later.

Forever Skies was reviewed over approximately 115 hours of gameplay on PC via Steam with a key provided by the publisher. All screenshots were taken during the review process.