Forever Skies is a game that spends its whole runtime trying desperately to claw its way out of the game design version of the uncanny valley, and only partially succeeds. I can see and respect the effort, and I never quite disliked it enough to stop playing before the end, but I never quite felt like it was hitting its stride either and it's hard for me to recommend it. I'm ultimately going to give a thumbs up because I feel for the devs and I want the industry to make more games about exploring a world in the sky (it's been 25 years since Skies of Arcadia, guys) but prospective players should wait for updates or a sale.

There's too much random generation for a cohesive structured experience, but too little variety to make it a properly engaging sandbox. Every type of generated location has fundamentally the same layout with perhaps a few minor differences in item placement, if even that much (every escape pod and biome giant bug spawn is the exact same). When there are only maybe 10-15 types of location total in the game, this makes everything start to look the same very early on. The worst part is there's no real reason to visit any area more than once or twice just to check off the discoverables, since after the very early game you'll never realistically need more resources than what you get for visiting once.

There's too much openness and exploration focus for a linear experience, but the game throws a tantrum if you ever try to go through a major (large radar icon) location before the quest markers told you to. Usually you get blocked off by some kind of quest item or missing upgrade, but one time I was able to explore almost the whole area and ended up finding a plant whose description told me it had story-related applications, so I grabbed some seeds and planted it in my ship. This made it funny when the game had me print out a hologram to find out what kind of plant I need to get and it was just the one I already had, but it was considerably less funny when the game put its foot down and refused to acknowledge I already had that plant. I had to go all the way back through the area I'd already explored, run past a half dozen beefy enemies with acid spit because fighting them would be too much of a chore, grab another seed, and then plant that seed in a new pot and wait for it to grow. The whole process took most of an hour.

Then there are the glitches and oversights, which are understandable from this sort of team but nonetheless omnipresent.
* General performance issues, especially with the extractor equipped. You will hit single digit FPS at some point, and you will crash from running out of memory if you play too long.
* Quite a few people on the forums have reported the ship getting stuck, with the fix apparently being to remove and reinstall a turbine. I myself once was listed as docked after loading a save where I was at a boarding-plank-only location, and it took some fiddling for the game to stop considering me to be docked.
* At least one softlock is possible if you run out of seeds for a specific plant while inside the green biome, as that plant is key to crafting the item that lets you go through the green biome's walls.
* Certain items show up in the database but never spawn under any circumstances (at time of writing the devs have confirmed this for at least one item, the half wall). Others (moth swarms, giant bug eggs, machine scrap) suggest at future uses that never seem to materialize, though maybe I just missed those.
* There's no shredder/trash can for destroying items, so you can't get rid of unusable waste products like excess seeds other than awkwardly dumping them out of your inventory at a landing site and flying away hoping they despawn.
* You can't change your airship balloon's skin except by awkwardly crafting a bunch of rooms to the side so you canadd a second balloon first. Not even if you're docked.
* The final location's platform is too high to land on directly, but the one part of the platform that's within boarding plank range has an invisible wall at the top that almost cuts you off from getting to the top.
* Trading prices are an afterthought (e.g. transformers sell for the same price as just one of their three components, which is the same price as the common-as-dirt synthetic compound, but machine scrap found in abundance in the same area the trader is in sells for more than anything else; buying anything at all is a nightmare).
* And when you beat the game, you get dumped unceremoniously back to your airship without so much as a fade in, just a single congratulatory text box after a couple seconds. Kind of like the ending to this review

Крайне противоречивые впечатления об игре.
С одной стороны, видны некоторые хорошие идеи, которые пытались скомбинировать выживание в Subnautica и механики Raft, или может даже первородного SkyBlock.
А с другой - сюжет по моим ощущениям как будто впилен в геймплей, чтобы просто было понятно, зачем этот геймплей вообще нужен. Гринда ресурсов крайне много, при том, что реально для прохождения игры на средней сложности нам в кооперативе достаточно было стартовых механизмов с включением только необходимых, открывающих дальнейшее прохождение. А вещи, которых так не хватало в начале (типа автоматизации получения воды и полива растений), появляются лишь в конце кампании, когда смысла в них особо уже и нет. Либо, допускаю, что мы вдвоем с другом не могли какие-то очевидные вещи находить, либо недостаточно гриндили, что очевидно не добавляет приятного опыта от игры.
Откровенно говоря складывается впечатление, что разработчики очень боялись, что игрок проведет в игре меньше времени, чем им хотелось бы. Но вместо каких-то интересных механик, которые могли бы затянуть на подольше, - неприлично долгое время на анимации добычи ресурсов, на их создание и на перемещение между однотипными точками для гринда. И даже так - всего-то 20 с лишним часов геймплея с отсутствующим желанием перепроходить игру. Вишенкой на торте является наличие в игре контента с политическим контекстом. Разработчики просят за игру деньги, и я рад их за нее отдать. Но мне предложили вместо этого довольно скучный геймплей, сюжет с сомнительной подачей и политические взгляды разработчиков, но никак не игру, в которую было бы приятно поиграть вечерами.
Учитывая все это, я никак не могу оставить положительный отзыв об игре, хотя и очень долгое время ее ждал и надеялся на ее успех.

скучная однообразная играя, не рекомендую проходить