19 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 11.6 hrs on record (10.2 hrs at review time)
Posted: Apr 25, 2021 @ 8:16am

Extremely simple, sometimes oversimplified - especially when it comes to combat, but yet delivering enough joy to deserve a fair thumb up.

Before you decide to buy SKYHILL here on Steam, it's worth checking demo of it, to see if gameplay suits what you're looking for, and maybe... just maybe, considering getting it for your phone instead.
This game was clearly designed for mobile devices in first place, and then simply ported to PC. That mean you can play it using only your mouse, or you can even challenge yourself and play SKYHILL exclusively with your left feet, but feel warned - there's no Steam achievement for that. (No, don't do that, it was a bad joke.)

RNG is a huge part of many games, to the point where without it they wouldn't exist in the form we love them for, because "rolling dices" makes them more unpredictable and less monotonous.
SKYHILL is all about calculating risks and possible profits then making choices based on what you see on your screen, and sometimes you'll feel lucky and rewarded or unlucky and unfairly punished. It's getting heavier on hardest difficulty level, and for example I had situation, where I missed enemy 7 times in a row, and each strike had 80% chance for success, or another one where I was unable to find a single brick, which I needed to finish important upgrade. It's very important to mention, that most of time I felt like I had control over resources managment and was ready for anything I can find in next room. During my ~30 approaches in most of cases I was dying because of my own mistakes and bad decisions.
Amount of RNG can be increased by various perks (passive and active) which player can unlock pretty fast, and they add enough variety to actual gameplay, to make SKYHILL a good and interesting experience everytime you try some new combination. Great example is passive perk called "absolute mess" which makes you find more items in every room, but you lose one random item every 10 turns. It was fun finding how each perk affect gameplay and change the way you play in order to succeed. There are also perks without proper description, but they're supposed to be like that, so player has to find out what they do on his own.

Lore is nothing special, but also not bland, and pieces of historical background of game events unlock randomly during gameplay. It was interesting enough to make me want to play again, just to find more puzzles of it. It has everything you can expect to find in short indie game, and that include multiple hidden endings.

SKYHILL is not a game for everyone. If what you want is rich RPG or/with deep combat mechanics, then none of them can be found here. But if you're looking for simple game with interesting story, where everything you need is your own brain and some luck, then there's high chance that you'll enjoy your time spend in this game, just like I did.

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1 Comments
BloodMist Oct 14, 2023 @ 2:34am 
When a game is like over 50 percent luck based, it really shows the downside of relying way too much on such mechanics in this day and age I have to say. Procedural generation just makes it worse, hah.