Soaring above the clouds in an airplane, or, if you’re adventurous, riding in a hot air balloon is often a pleasure for those who are into the excitement of travel. You can see the world from above. Needless to say, in-flight meals aren’t always half bad. Imagine the exact same experience. But the world is completely and utterly destroyed. Welcome to the future Earth: bright green skies and piles of toxic trash. Oh, and let’s not forget the brutal thunderstorms and ravenous swarms of giant moths. The whole thing is so intriguing that I can’t help but wonder what we might find when we finally build the right components for the airship and get down there. It’s a feeling inspired by Forever Skies, an air-survival (and ultimately horror-survival)-slash-airship-building simulation that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in closed-test form.
If you’re into heavy combat and moment-to-moment action, you might want to look elsewhere. For the first few moments at least, Forever Skies is a slow-burning survival game that does the boldest thing to make it feel as big as a bug in a destroyed world. Start by looking for basic things like food, water, health kits, crafting materials like metals and synthetics, and other tools needed for survival. Soon after, you get a customizable home base and an airship that serves as your primary way of navigating the world.
You have to build and place the engine and keep it fueled. Everything is very meticulous and not to mention very slow. It could be good or it could be bad, but I was looking for a way to kick back and relax. You can set the airship to simply glide toward a distant point of interest (marked by a flashing light) at a set speed. It often feels completely atmospheric, especially when paired with an almost lethargic, synth-heavy soundtrack.
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Forever Skies has what appears to be dynamic weather and rainstorms. This can go back and forth. Alternatively, you can pass through them once the airships are up and operational. Since this is a survival game at heart, you have to manage resource pools such as stamina, health, hunger, and thirst. All things considered, however, these pools deplete rather slowly, and the items needed to keep them filled are all too mundane. If your only goal is to collect, it means you don’t get overwhelmed by the survival aspect. Everything mixes together to create an experience that is at least as thematically paced as Fallout 4, with less emphasis on shooting and looting.
With that said, pretty early on you unlock the scanner, allowing you to remotely scan various items around the world. Obtain blueprints that can be manufactured. This happens to be available once you unlock the Airship. This all happens right near where the dropship lands at the start of Forever Skies, and in her first 20 minutes or so you end up crafting and attaching components to a fully customizable ship. Every time you create a new item, you have to spend the required resources and wait for the fabricator to do the work. In the meantime, you can pop outside and use the Deck Extractor to shoot down her floating resource nodes to replenish the store. more craft. It’s a pretty satisfying loop.
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With access to the aptly named Build Tool, you could theoretically start increasing the size of the airship itself via new rooms, catwalks, and other prefabs. It’s a bit buggy at the moment, the only place I could place the new room was to the left of the cockpit, which cut off the cockpit and made the room inaccessible. It’s very cool without
Each point of interest seems to have various items, blueprints, and at least one special battery required for more advanced crafting. required to build. Turbine parts could have pushed it down to a lower altitude than needed for combat. Located among the relics on the surface of the Earth, we may learn more about the catastrophe that has struck the world as we know it. But I’m excited to see where this post-apocalyptic air show ends.
