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When you think of Bossa Studios, your mind might go to games like Surgeon Simulator or I Am Bread, perhaps not an open-world survival crafting game, but that's exactly what Lost Skies is. So, what has Bossa brought to the table to make their game stand out from the plethora of other games in this genre? Let's take a look at the Early Access release of the game.
Lost Skies - Gameplay Impressions
The angle Lost Skies takes on the genre becomes immediately apparent when you start playing the game. Instead of your traditional open-world setting, Lost Skies opts to make the world a series of floating islands.
Gameplay is quite physics-based, with characters able to ragdoll and grapple around the islands. This is both a blessing and a curse. While the momentum-based physics is quite cool for navigating the island, it can also be frustrating. Players will take damage from falling or hitting walls when grappling, and it just feels a bit too much. It's easy to accidentally misjudge a grapple and slam against a wall, which will kill you if your health is low.
Do these mechanics really add to the game? Not really. I'd have much rather the game be more lenient in this regard, especially as in the early game, when you don't have a skyship, you have to respawn right back at the start of the game, which can be frustrating.
Combat and gathering resources both feel fairly "flat", mostly holding down a button and occasionally dodging, mining metal, or chopping down trees is also pretty time-consuming, considering the amount of resources you need.
The skyship is the real core of the game, though. While you can build on islands, and some structures must be built on islands, your main base will be your skyship, which can navigate the world and is built block by block by your own hands. As you explore other islands, you'll unlock new ship parts to improve your ship.
Despite this, the unique movement in the game and the cool skyship mechanic, I still didn't really enjoy my time with Lost Skies all that much. The world just feels... lifeless. There's just no charm to the game, and after exploring your tenth ruin, you really don't want to go finding more. The game is pretty much island hopping to upgrade your skyship, but there's not much to do with your skyship once it's upgraded.
Of course, the game is still in Early Access, and I do hope that Bossa are able to bring the game back around, but right now I can't see myself going back to Lost Skies.
Lost Skies - Steam Deck Performance Tested
Lost Skies is a bit of a mixed bag on the Steam Deck right now. The game is getting controller support, and there is actually some support already in the game, but unfortunately, it's missing some key elements which make the game unplayable with just a controller, such as selecting hotbar items, therefore, you're best off playing with a Keyboard controller layout on your Steam Deck for now. There's a community layout that works pretty well, which is what I used.
Initially, it seems as though the game plays fine. If we lower the graphical settings as low as they can go, and then use TAAU and set the resolution scale to 75%, we can get a fairly solid 30 FPS. The game looks quite blurry with TAAU, but it is playable.
But once I actually made a Skyship, the game crashed; it also crashed when I tried naming a blueprint for a Skyship. I think the RAM/VRAM usage (which is always high) goes beyond the limits of the Steam Deck at times. I was able to get past it after a reboot, but bear in mind that the game will be unstable, especially as your skyship expands.
Lost Skies is on the edge of working well on the Steam Deck, and I think with some optimization later on in Early Access, along with the upcoming controller support, the game could play well on the go.
Final Thoughts
Lost Skies does have potential. There are some finicky parts to the game, and the optimization and bugginess are a bit of a pain, but the concept of building your own skyship and exploring a floating island world is an interesting one. I just think the setting of this being a post-apocalyptic world is a missed opportunity; having NPCs and things actually happening in the world would have made the game feel much more alive and enjoyable.
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Lost skies skies is the successor to Bossa's failed MMO: Worlds Adrift. Lost Skies inherits its aesthetics and theme from Worlds Adrift, but did not inherit what made WA fun: Life.
In WA players inhabited a seemingly dead world. One could play for hours and never see another soul, but then your peaceful crafting session would be interrupted by the distant sound of engines in throttle and a glow behind the clouds. We these newcomers friends or foes?
I've played lots of games but my favorite gaming experience game from WA. I had built a small ship, just a box with engines and wings, built for speed. I was cruising from island to island searching for technogy, it was night in game. I had been playing for hours and had never met another player when suddenly a huge ship, crewed by several players and teaming with cannon burst from the cloud bank above me. I had no weapons. I tried to evade, but their cannonade was too much and my wings and engines were taking damage. Because WA is physics based, gravity plays a role in flight. I could not evade, but I could fall. I put my helm down into a nose dive and set my gravity core to 0. I put my engines in full throttle and watched my altimeter drop.
In WA, unlike LS, there was no 3rd person option when steering your ship. You had to fly in 1st person from the helm, it was from this view that I watched my altimeter edge towars the red line with denoted the bottom of the world and a kill wall. I was aiming for this kill wall, because right above it was a thick churning black mist.
The pirates were not far behind me and i could hear their cannonade and occasionallt feel a ball hit home against my hull. Then, as my altimeter reached its last few lines toward red... I pulled up, set my gravity core to normal and killed my engines. My ship, pushed only by momentum thanks to WAs physics, glided soflty into the churning black cloud above the kill wall. With my engines off I was invisible, but I could see the glow of my pursuer's engines through the cloud. They searched in circles but soon gave up and I heard their engines go to full throttle as they vanished into the uppee clouds. I rose from the mist victorious and Ive been chasing thst high ever since.
LS aims to fix alot of WAs problems and in many ways it does but it forgets what made WA memorable, and that is the element of life. LS claims to be co-op pve, but that falls flat. What is a game about sky ships without sky pirates to live in it?