Poly Skies

[i]Poly Skies[/i] is one of those games that can easily be overlooked, although I’d argue that it’s one of the most enjoyable ways to initiate players into the city builder genre. The game was designed with the goal of providing an easy and relaxing experience, and for that reason the mechanics are intentionally simplified. However, it can well appeal to more experienced players too, as a zen-like escapade from the micromanagement and over-optimization hell that even the blockbusters of the genre make one get used to. [i]Poly Skies[/i] is about creating little communities of people on floating islands. You build them houses, production buildings (arborist, mine, quarry, fishery), and fields to grow crops. You can expand to nearby islands by building portals for people to travel between, and each new island can thus become a cradle for a new village. At the end of each week, an airship arrives at your main island, and you can exchange the resources gathered for gold or new villagers. Later on, enemies will occasionally attack your houses if there is no defense building in their proximity. In a nutshell, [i]Poly Skies[/i] does what you’d expect a city builder to do, but on a much, much smaller scale. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2944599344 For example, there are only 2 types of living quarters, 3 types of crops and only 1 type from each of the other production buildings. There is no production chain involved, and the production buildings have no customization options apart from the amount of people you want to allocate to them. Even though each villager has different values for their skills, there’s currently no way to choose which of them you want to work in a certain place - the game designates them automatically and the workplace will automatically raise the employees’ corresponding work skill (if one works at the fishery, their fishing skill will be improved). The buildings can be freely moved without any loss of materials, and without having to wait for them to be demolished. Demolishing a building is also instant, and you will get back all the materials you spent on building it. The islands you colonize will all contribute their resources to a global treasury, and the villagers will move freely between them to reach their homes and workplaces as long as there is a portal that they can use. The economy doesn’t require any kind of optimization: there are plenty of resources, and they pile up very easily because the population consumes little amount of food compared to what you produce, and the buildings are overall very cheap to build. Thus the progression of the game is quite fast and dare I say effortless, allowing you to freely expand as you desire. There is a happiness system in place, but like pretty much all other mechanics of the game, it’s overly-simplified and very transparent (the exact parameters that influence this mechanic are unclear): during the day, the happiness decreases as people go to work, and at night it goes back up as long as they have enough food and some relaxation buildings accessible (campfire and a later-unlocked shrine). https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2944599460 The game doesn't have a tutorial, but it does have a quest sequence that guides you tightly though all the mechanics and teaches you how to play the game. In the beginning of the game, it’s advisable to follow them closely because even if you build things ahead of time, you’ll have to build them again when the quest requires you to do so (a quest that asks you to place a certain building will not autocomplete if you already placed that building before you received the quest). Aside from these quests, there are some lore fragments that you automatically collect by colonizing new islands, and gathering all five of them will award you an achievement. However, as smooth as [i]Poly Skies[/i]’s gameplay is, the game could use a few quality-of-life improvements. For one, there’s no autosave - if the game crashes, you lose all your progression (it does have a manual save though). Secondly, the UI is lacking the display of some stats: you can see how many villagers you have, but you can’t see how many free housing spots you have; you can see the amount of resources in storage, but you can’t see the amount you produce on a daily basis, from each type of resource; you can see the overall happiness score, but the happiness buildings don’t indicate how much they will increase it when built. Thirdly, there’s no way to quickly cycle through the inhabited islands - even if they’re easy to find since they’re close to each other, when you start expanding your empire and colonize many of them, it can become tedious to always scroll the map to find a specific island you’re looking for, even more so when you have your buildings under attack. And lastly, there are no notifications about new quests or new lore fragments collected - these are hidden under some panels that are always collapsed by default (and return to a collapsed state every time you press ESC to exit the building view) - this would all be fine for the purpose of keeping the game HUD uncluttered, if only there was a visual hint for the player to know when a quest is new or completed (the audio clue does not suffice). A lot of these issues will be addressed and implemented in future updates. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2944599391 [i]Poly Skies[/i] is a very short game that can be finished in 2-3h if one limits themselves solely to obtaining all the achievements - which by the way, unlock naturally as you play and as you expand to having at least five islands populated. The game can surely be played for much longer than that, if one wants to. It also offers a creative mode in which all the buildings are unlocked from the start, but the achievements are disabled. [i]Poly Skies[/i] doesn’t bring anything revolutionary to the genre, but I love it for its simplicity and for how easy it is to handle. It does have its flaws, but they're rather minor in comparison to the deeply enjoyable and recreational experience that it provided overall. 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Go try the demo! It’s a one man show, they are responding on the discord, and being up front in the patch notes about the game having a few areas for improvement and things that are still on the to do list. I enjoyed the music, art style and the building process, so for that I’ll stick with it and hope they can make it really shine in the future once it’s polished a bit more.

ORIGINAL WITH IMAGES: https://www.neonlightsmedia.com/blog/poly-skies-review [b]Well well, isn’t that nice, its the steam Base Builder fest and we are being treated with a release of a quint little cute-looking poly village builder and colony simulator. But is it really as relaxing as it claims to be, or is it so rampant with bugs that you can hardly take in the peace without tearing out your hair? Let's find out![/b] [h1]Main Menu[/h1] The main menu is about what you'd expect; it has some soothing music, functional buttons, and a settings menu where you can tweak the game a bit to your taste and also take a look at the key binds. Everything is working here as far as I can see. [h1]Into the relaxing world we go[/h1] Ah, nothing feels better than starting a new game in a base builder, everything is so fresh and new, just waiting for you to colonize the land ,to build civilization, and this game is no different. The first thing you notice about the game is how relaxing it is. The music doesn't feel intimidating in any way, the graphics are neat and quite cute, and there is no sense of danger to be found anywhere. You start with 5 colonists, and your first task is to get them houses, a place for the trade ship to come every week, and some resource gathering buildings, no rocket science to say the least. [h1]Sandcastles And Waves.[/h1] Now, let's be clear: This is a base building game, so if the building is poor, the entire game will fail. But fortunately, the building feels good, there is a nice selection of buildings and cute little decorations that you can scatter about everywhere, without making it too complicated with too many resources for all buildings. In addition, you can do all the basics, rotate your buildings, destroy them, and move them; you have access to all the tools you need when to customize your colony. Additionally, I enjoyed the challenge presented by each island's relative smallness, which required you to quickly expand to other islands. However, I did come across a few minor bugs when building in-game, which we will discuss next. [h1]Mom, there is a tree growing inside of the kitchen.[/h1] Unfortunately, there are some bugs and some odd design choices that I'm not sure were done on purpose. For example, sometimes you won't be able to place down buildings on spots of grass surrounded by trees, even if there theoretically should be enough space. This might just seem like a bad design decision but what makes me think this is part of a larger bug is that sometimes you can place buildings in the middle of mountains or rocks, or sometimes they even get teleported there when you're trying to place them. On top of that I also had it happen a few times that when I selected a building, it just didn’t register, and I had to close the building menu and open it again before it would allow me to build. [h1]Colony simulator?[/h1] If you believe the tags, this game is a colony simulator; however, the majority of it is just base building. Yes, you have to take care of people, but their emotions depend on the buildings that are available to them and whether you have actually fed them more than once since the game's beginning. As a result, there isn't much to say about this part of the game as it doesn't actually really exist. [h1]Performance.[/h1] According to my personal experience, the game runs more than fine without any noticeable lag spikes or crashes, so it is well-optimized for the average Windows PC. [h1]Conclusion[/h1] The game is a relaxing base builder, and that’s everything to be said about it. It isn't revolutionary, doesn't have a wide variety of building options, isn't rampant with bugs, won't keep you entertained for hours on end, but it will help you unwind after a long, stressful day. It is bang average, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. For 7.50 euros, I really can't be too critical. 7.5/10 [i]We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn’t impact our review in any way.[/i]

I'm on a Mac Mini M1 from 2020 with MacOS Ventura. The game used to show up without islands to build on, but it has been addressed by the developer and now I can say it's working. With the huge number of city builders, and how few work in M1 I am glad I have a relaxing one to just chill.

I must admit that this is a very good game even for being Early access. The only drawback is the lack of buildings but that will be addressed as time goes on. Some of the buildings that I would like to see added are a foresters hut, cow building, Chicken building, Dairy farm for like cheese, Milk. But I'm not the developer so I can't decide what types of buildings will get added. But I also think that more variety of crops need to be added like corn, grapes for wine, strawberries, oranges, Apples, and Pears. The game Itself runs smooth, There aren't really any gamebreaking bugs and If there were the dev has already fixed them and If not is already addressing them.

I'm not really sure if Poly Skies is an asset flip. Some elements of this game certainly make it seem like the developer put some effort into assembling some kind of original here. On the other hand, a lot of the game assets don't seem like they were created by the developer, but they haven't credited any asset creators for supplying assets, which might be a case of plagiarism. This looks a lot like a bunch of low poly assets dumped onto a barebones "Dwarf Fortress" kind of ripoff Unity template/blueprint. There's no evidence, so we need to give the benefit of the doubt... regardless, asset flip or not, the quality here is indistinguishable from many asset flip/cash grab scams, and that's a problem in itself. This is extremely barebones, there's little to no bespoke content that I can see, no tutorial, just a few "quests" that might have just been part of a blueprint. There's really no quality or substance to this game, so whether this is a flip or not doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact is has no value as a real game. Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality which fits with the idea they weren't developed by the game creator... they look like they're "just reasonable enough" to go on sale as part of an asset pack. The issue of asset flipping aside, ultimately the quality of these assets is low and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience. The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the 1990s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 6 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Poly Skies has the gamer gouging price of around $8 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $8 asking price for this game could get you games like "Assetto Corsa", "Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel" or "Bioshock 2 Remastered". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. [quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]

A great introduction to city builder managerial games. Simple to get into so new players can decide if they like the genre or for those like me who want to play a city builder game but on a smaller less stressful scale. My only real suggestion for improvement would be some kind of sound or alert when your buildings need repaired, something like how Command and Conquer does it.

Definitely give at least the demo a try! Building your town is really fun. Plus it just looks adorable, I like the art style and the whole sounddesign very much. A fun, relaxing game that was made by only one (!) person. Plus the guy also puts out detailed and honest patchnotes and answers on the discord. Support it! :)

== As of March 2023, about an hour of relaxing gameplay == I was able to "complete the game" in just over an hour (90% achievements, unlocked everything). From other reviews it sounds like this small developer is working on expanding the game which is great. The game is relaxing with a cute art style. Nothing too challenging. But also, none of the "existential crisis" waves that can propel this genre of games forward, so you know what you're getting into. I hope to see the game get more updates, and some balance to slow it down and create more scarcity.

Looks nice, idea is good, but plays a bit bumpy. Like, why does the Trader not come when I call them? It really hinders progress. Why can't settlers get offspring etc...