Forever Skies Review – Is It Worth Playing?

Forever Skies is a survival game set on a destroyed Earth. The surface world is covered in a toxic cloud. You return to Earth after hundreds of years in search of a cure. To do this, you have to traverse the sky in an expandable airship. Finding rooftops and other tall structures that are not encased by this cloud. Scavenge for food and materials to eventually make your plunge down into the dust and find the cure to save humanity.

After the success developers Far From Home received with the demo of Forever Skies, they decided to delay the game a couple of months. This would allow the dev team to patch up bugs that came up during the open demo of the game and add content at launch that was initially planned to release later as an update like exploring under the dust, a feature many fans were looking forward to. After months of waiting, we are finally able to play the game. 

The Tutorial

Forever Skies has many mechanics to learn. From how to cure the different viruses you get from eating, to how to unlock new research to upgrade your airship. The tutorial zone slowly leads into the main story of the game. Humanity fled planet Earth hundreds of years ago due to an ecological disaster. However, people on the space station got ill and the cure could be found somewhere on Earth. Getting it will be your job, so you head back to earth where you crash-land on a lower part of a skyscraper. 

This is where the game begins, you have to make your way to the top and fix up the very conveniently placed half-built airship. After you get your ship into the sky the quests switch over from ”complete this task” to “go towards this location” making for a smooth transition between the tutorial and the rest of the game. For what is clearly meant to be a tutorial, Forever Skies luckily throws out the basics which people should already know like how to walk or jump. And only teach you useful things.

The Virus System

During the tutorial, you already get a sneak peek of the virus system. When eating raw vegetables, meat, or when you get attacked by enemies, you risk the chance of getting infected with a virus. Depending on what you eat or what attacked you, the side effects are different. Some of them are harder to deal with than others. For example, at the start of the game, you get told to eat a sun melon. This gives the player the Photophobia virus, and what it does is hurt the player when you look directly into the sun (don’t try this at home). After a few more quests, you are being taught how to cure yourself. The method is simple, you fish up a dust moth and cook it, and after eating it you are cured. While I find that this in and of itself is a missed opportunity to make an in-depth medical system where you have to research an antidote, there is something to scratch that itch. After going below the dust and reaching the surface for the first time, you unlock a virus sample analyzer. Here is where you take an item that infects you, like the sun melon, and take its DNA apart in a mini-game to get a pure version of the virus. With these pure viruses, you can make boosters, like a hyperthermia booster. This is what makes Forever Skies unique, and once you learn how the mini-game works it is a lot of fun. I hope they expend a lot on this during the early access stage.

Gathering Resources and Crafting

There are a vast amount of items the player needs to collect for crafting. Most can be found at the different outposts scattered around the planet. Large satellite structures with a blinking light to guide you towards them from afar. While machine parts or electrical components can be picked up by hand, other materials require a deck extractor. This is a large machine you place on your airship that shoots a beam to break larger materials down for use. This is mainly used to collect metal and synthetics with copper and more later in the game. These resources are used a lot in crafting, but luckily clusters of metal and synthetics float around in the sky. This gives you something to do when you put the airship on autopilot toward your next destination. The way these materials spawn in is similar to Raft. They come from one direction, unlike Raft, however the speed of the wind determines how many and how fast resources spawn in. Later on in the game, you find a blueprint for an automatic collector, which makes getting metal and synthetics a breeze. For items like glass and copper, the deck extractor can be really annoying to use, as you need to rotate the ship and have it hover in the correct location to harvest them. And most of the time they will be obstructed by walls and the sorts. This is where a smaller carry-sized extractor comes in. After unlocking this, gathering resources becomes a lot easier as you can just walk up to it and break it down on the spot. 

Forever Skies has a lot of items to craft. You do not have every recipe unlocked from the start, nor when you pick up the items it requires to craft. To unlock new crafting recipes you either need to find data cards which are found on points of interest, these mainly give decorative pieces for your base. The other way is to scan broken variants or raw materials with the scanner. Afterward, you still can not make it until you research it. This mechanic is fine, albeit a bit annoying at times, as it costs resources to research. I would understand if you had to research the recipes you obtain by scanning raw resources, as you would have to put this idea together and see if it works. But when you scan an already existing machine, you would think the 3d printer you use already has the necessary information to make it. Just a small gripe, as resources are abundant if you travel to every point of interest you come across along the way. When crafting, you quickly realize you will need a massive airship. Not only are there a lot of machines, there are multiple chargers for each tier for one example, but not only that. But the amount of storage you are going to need is massive. On your journey, you find a lot of random components and the initial storage box size is very small. Luckily you do unlock larger chests not far into the game but early on it can be a real hassle, especially since some items like batteries or plants do not stack, taking up a lot of your inventory.

Base Building

Expanding your airship takes a large amount of both metal and synthetic, depending on if you want to have plastic or metal walls/floors. These materials luckily float around in the sky, and you can easily harvest them with the deck extractor. Due to the amount of resources it takes, do not expect to make quick progress on expanding the base early game. After having built an automatic collector or two, expanding is way more relaxing as you do not have to keep switching between building, collecting, and eating to survive. You can add ladders to add different elevations to your ship. But keep in mind that the larger you make, the harder it will become to see where you are flying. Adding extra levels makes this especially hard, and I may or may not have crashed my ship into radio towers more than once. Decorations are plentiful, new recipes for shelves, lights, tables, etc can be obtained by picking up data cards on the points of interest. At first, I was pretty confused as to how to make these items, as they did not show up in the build tool or the fabricator. Turns out you need to find and build a completely different kind of crafting station in order to craft them. In the grand scheme of things, this is not the worst, but since the build tool does not have a lot of uses besides adding rooms to the ship, it would have been nice to be able to use that instead. Painting walls is a feature in Forever Skies as well, and there are a lot of different colors and patterns to choose from, so you will be able to truly make your airship your own. There are also collectibles like posters and other smaller decorations you can find out in the world. Different ones spawn depending on the type of location you visit. These look really nice and don’t spawn at every tower, so it is a nice treat to find one. But the “Join Project Oxygen” poster spawns way too often. Some other posters also take up an entire wall, which is a little much in my opinion, as this makes them really hard to place them in a nice-looking spot.

Points of Interests

There are multiple locations you can visit in Forever Skies. The most common one is the radio tower. To avoid making them feel too similar, the developers added variations of most points of interest. Some are more overgrown and others have a small village. This is the same for wind farms and greenhouses. Depending on which alteration you find, you come across alternate objects to scan, which unlock new crafting recipes. The towers themselves only have a few different designs per variation, so if you’ve discovered a few, you’ve seen them all. While this is no dealbreaker by any means, I do wish they made them a little more distinct or at least added a lot more variations as I explored three radio towers in a row that were identical. With how often you see and visit them, especially at the start of your journey, having more unique towers to explore would be really nice. In the current stage of the game, there are four different points of interest. The three I just mentioned, and the last one being the lift to go below the dust. This POI seems to have the least amount of variations. While all of them are 100% identical, you will have to visit one of the story that has an extra room that is blocked off at the other locations. This makes exploring more than one pretty boring, as you already know where all the secret loot stashes are hiding. 

Under the Dust

After finding and activating the lift, it is time to go under the dust. This was the part that I was really excited about, and it did not disappoint. The surface has an overgrown post-apocalyptic look and is covered in ‌toxic dust, making you unable to breathe. Unlike the open space high up in the clouds, down here you have to navigate through narrow corridors and tunnels. To help you not get lost there are arrows on the ground pointing back to the lift which is a very clever design. There are also oxygen refill stations scattered around as you can not breathe the toxic air down here, but you will need to power these with special crystal batteries. These crystals can only be found below on the surface and are used to power more important machines. There are a lot of hidden loot stashes you can find by exploring and destroying certain walls or vines. Exploring deeper below the dust, you will encounter hostile enemies. So you don’t walk in unprepared, the devs found an excellent way of telling the player they need a weapon. Crossbow bolts can be found sticking out of walls in a lot of places, signaling that people were once down here fighting something. Personally, I love these small details as it is very immersive compared to a text window popping up telling you there are enemies in the area.

At the game’s current state, the fundamentals are rock solid to build on. The experience is pretty short, and you will have seen and done everything in a couple of hours, but there is already a lot of lore scattered around the world in the form of digital notes for people who want to learn everything they can about this world. There is a lot you can do to customize your ship. And the game looks absolutely stunning both above the dust and below as well. The sound design is fantastic, especially the thunderstorms. With many more big updates planned like 4-player co-op, finishing the story, new locations to explore, new treats, and way more. 

All in all, Forever Skies is definitely a game I can recommend to any survival game fan out there.