Black Skylands

I'm giving this a positive rating, but with a couple qualifiers. The primary one is that I'd love to see what a team with some experience could do in revisiting this concept. It all feels like a diamond in the rough; it could really shine with some focus and polish, but as it stands it doesn't truly shine. By and large, I enjoyed my time, but I also can't say I was enthusiastic. As I played, I had this niggling feeling that the game felt kind of anemic. There's a strong foundational core, but it never felt fleshed out or explored. There's a couple abilities you get that basically gatekeep progression, but while one is useful in combat there's no way to expand or upgrade it, and the other has one mandatory use and about four optional uses in past areas for treasure, and it's never brought up again. There's a couple sidequests (by which I mean literally two) where your choices matter, but it just changes how it ends. There's a bunch of spots in the main story where it feels like there was meant to be similar choices, but it's not to be. The game tries to build an interesting world, but it feels light on lore. Islands you liberate become populated with people, but almost none of them can be talked to. Your main base and one town are the exceptions, but most of it is idle chatter and I feel like that could have been spread out more. You can get more ships, but they're given after certain plot points and only have minor variations in stats with no other changes. About the only thing I can say shines quite well is the on-foot combat; there's enough variety and options to accomodate several playstyles. There's not a huge amount of enemy variety, mostly getting damage bumps, but there's enough that I also never thought it get stale. One of the playstyles though it is hampered somewhat by the enemy detection radius. Every enemy can see about 180 degrees, a view cone is visible but too faint to be of help if you're not actively focusing on it, and the vision is far enough that you can get spotted off-screen on the vertical when you can't even see them. It seems to be an intended feature, you specifically get a melee damage buff for hitting an enemy in the back and the fact the view cones are visible at all implies they're meant to be seen.